Crossroads
by HDUC
Summary: He loves her, and she loves him. But no one knows better than the Doctor that timing is everything. So how can they make their metaphorical paths cross when time is not on their side?
1. Late Spring, 2008

**This will be a multi-chapter story, though hopefully not too epic. We're beginning the story with a bit of angst, but don't let it fool you; the smutty objective is the same as always! **

**Enjoy, and stay tuned for more...**

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**Late spring, 2008**

Donna was still asleep, and the Doctor was restless. But, as usual, the week's events had been so exhausting, he was reluctant to wake her before her time. Humans needed a lot of sleep anyway; add to it the running and screaming they did with him, and they were practically a species of hypersomniacs.

He stalked back and forth, up and down the ramp. He circled the console on heavy feet. He tugged at his hair and sighed, whispered mild curses, contemplated having that rare alcoholic beverage… or three.

Because as restlessness was par-for-the-course, what was not usual was the _reason_ for this restlessness. This time, it was not merely a hunger to get back out there, stir the pot, run and scream and jump and show off the universe to his closest friend. It was something just as visceral, but less solvable, and something for which he was much less equipped. It was not unprecedented, just a bit unwelcome.

Love.

Over the past week, ever since the Sontaran debacle when he'd seen that ring on her finger, he had been pushing that word away. After all, the last time he'd allowed himself to acknowledge it, he'd wound up standing on a beach, emptily saying goodbye to a trusted companion whom he'd never, ever see again.

But in spite of that, he couldn't deny it: he was in love once more. And it wasn't just because now someone else had her, and her affections had been diverted. It was because of who she was and what she did, and how well she did it and with how much conviction and intelligence and grace. She was tough and compassionate, a fighter, but also a lover. And she'd been all these things all along, he'd just been too wrapped up in himself to see it. But now, damn it; another trusted companion, who had saved not only him, but also the Earth. But he knew it couldn't end any better than last time. He was destined to suffer the same heartbreak, but couldn't shake the feeling.

He had an overwhelming urge to go back and find her, tell her everything. He was a passionate and impulsive man, and several times, he'd set coordinates to return to her front garden and bang on her door. But he had to resist, remind himself, _I had my chance… she's engaged now… she's chosen to walk away from me twice. Stay away, stay away, stay away._

And as if on cue, a mobile phone rang from somewhere on the console. It could only be _her._ She was the only person he knew who had the number.

He sighed. "Hi, Martha." He didn't bother with _hello_.

She sighed right back. "I knew it. Something's wrong. I'm glad I called."

"What do you mean?"

"When you dropped me off at my flat last week, I could tell… you're upset. Are you all right?"

"Yeah, I'm fine," he answered, a little too quickly.

Martha clicked her tongue. "Come on, Doctor, I know you better than that. I know it was a war, and she was… what did you call her? A generated anomaly? But a daughter is a daughter, and a death is a death."

The Doctor smiled a bit, in spite of himself. "I know you're right."

"And I know you've been through it before, losing family members and all that, but she was only a few hours old, and you never even had the chance to know her…"

"Martha, is all this supposed to make me feel _better_?"

"Sorry. I just wanted you to know that I understand. I may not be able to relate, exactly, but I get it. I do."

He knew she did. And that's why she was wonderful.

"Thank you," he said quietly. "That means a lot."

"This might be a stupid question, but do you want to talk about it? Might help. Certain feelings, you know… need to be purged in order for you to get past them."

"That's true – very wise."

"So…?"

"Okay," he conceded. Talking to her, thinking about her had got to him. His resistance had worn down to nothing. He needed to see her. "Yes – let's do it. I need to get some stuff off my chest, so let's meet up."

"Well, my schedule is a bit tight, but… when and where?"


	2. Late Spring, 2008 2

**Thank you for the well wishes, everyone! I'm so excited to continue publishing this story, now that I know I have so much support! On the other hand, it's a lot of pressure to succeed... ;-)**

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When she came through the gate to the playground around the corner from the flat she shared with Tom Milligan, the Doctor was already seated on a bench. Her eyes darted to the small treed area behind him, and she saw the half-hidden TARDIS, looming in the green.

She smiled and sat down. "Did you cheat?" she asked.

"Of course," he said. "What fun is it being me, if I had to _wait _for things?"

When they had spoken on the phone, they had agreed to meet three days hence, since Martha's schedule would not allow her more than thirty minutes for a chat until then. The Doctor, of course, had hopped forward in time immediately.

Well, almost immediately.

They had also discussed meeting for coffee, and the subject of Rapid Rower's coffee house had come up, a café in New Haven, Connecticut, where they had gone one year before, and Martha said she'd had the best coffee of her life. So, rather than meeting someplace in London for a second-rate cup, he'd made a stop in the New World for the Kenya Blend she fancied, before coming here.

Two insulated paper cups sat at his feet. He picked them both up and handed one of them to her.

"You weren't kidding?" she asked.

"No," he said. "When I say I'm going to get you your favorite cup of coffee, I deliver, love."

She smiled and took in the aroma. "Mm, Kenya blend?"

"You know it," he answered.

"My hero!" she quipped, before removing the lid, blowing delicately on the obsidian surface and taking a tentative sip. She swallowed, and then regarded him thoughtfully. "So, how are you holding up?"

"Martha, it's been fifteen minutes since I talked to you."

"Yeah, but it's been three days since I talked to you, so humour me."

"I'm fine about Jenny, really," he said. "She was a warrior, she died for the cause."

Her look turned scepitcal. "You're fine?"

"Yep," he answered, nodding slowly.

"Really?"

"Yep."

"Then why are we here, Doctor?"

"Would you believe I just wanted to see you?"

Sceptical turned to not-amused. "Ha ha, Doctor. You agreed to come here and talk, so why are you suddenly evading me?"

The Doctor shifted, and sat with one ankle crossed over the other knee, and one arm stretched over the back of the bench. He faced forward and took a sip of his coffee.

"I did agree to come here and talk, because, as you said, certain things need purging," he said quietly, not looking at her. "But I don't need to talk about Jenny. Yes, I grew to love her, but honestly, I hardly knew her. Death follows me everywhere, Martha, and I can deal with sadness. Nine hundred years' experience."

"Okay, then," she said, indulgently. "Then what _can't_ you deal with?"

He took another sip and a pregnant pause. He still didn't look at her.

"Martha," he said, low and shy. "How do you feel about me?"

Her eyebrows shot up. "Excuse me?"

"You heard me," he said. "How do you feel about me? I mean, now. Today. After everything we've… after everything. Do you still… how do you feel about me?"

He could see her staring at him out of the corner of his eye. He reckoned he'd surprised her with the question, even though she had made clear exactly how she felt all those months ago when she'd left the TARDIS to go back to her life. He reckoned she'd never expected the subject to come up again, once it had been laid to rest.

She didn't say anything for so long, he finally turned to look at her. She was staring still, but her face did not show surprise.

In fact, she smiled knowingly, and said, "I was wondering if maybe this might come up today."

"You were?"

"Yes."

"Then what was all that noise about Jenny?"

"I'm not a psychic, Doctor, I wasn't certain. And I still say you need to deal with _those_ feelings. But I had a hunch that sooner or later, we'd have this discussion. Today is as good a time as any."

"What made you think so?" he asked, his voice wavering. He wasn't entirely sure he wanted to hear the answer.

Though, for the moment, she didn't give him an answer to that question. She shifted positions as well now. She faced forward with her hands neatly in her lap, clasping her coffee. "You are my best friend," she said. "You always will be."

He nodded, and swallowed a lump in his throat.

She continued, "You are the cleverest, most exciting, dynamic man I've ever known, and I admire you more than you may ever understand."

He swallowed another lump, and asked, "But?"

"But…" she said, with gravity. "I'm in love with Tom."

"You've moved on."

"Yes."

"Entirely."

"Pretty much."

"Okay," he whispered.

A long silence ensued. They both sipped.

The Doctor broke the silence after a few minutes. "So, that's it, then?"

"What's it?" she asked, turning her head to make eye contact once more.

"Nothing lingering now? When you look at me, you don't feel… anything?"

"I wouldn't say that," she said, with a smile. "I feel warm. I feel the vestiges of what used to be there."

"But you don't love me."

"Not anymore. And that's a good thing, Doctor."

"Yeah."

"It is."

He took a deep breath and let it out harshly. Then he turned to face front again. "Well, as you must have worked out by now, I'm asking because… well…"

"I get it," she whispered. "Something has changed in you. Your feelings have changed."

"Yep."

"Do you…" she began, then gulped. "Do you love me? Really?"

He chuckled bitterly. "Yeah. For a guy who manipulates time, my timing is sure rubbish, isn't it?"

She smiled again. "Yes. But like I said, it's a good thing. It's okay. And you know why."

He nodded and stuck out his chin in defiance.

"I'm only going to live maybe another seventy years. Maybe a little more, if I'm very, very lucky. What about you?" she asked.

"Yeah, yeah," he muttered. "I know."

"In the long-term, it would never work. Even _then_ I knew it. Just like you know it now."

"So, what, you just…" he began, his voice growing bitter and harsh. "… you just walked out of the TARDIS and got over it? Got engaged to someone else and never gave it another thought?"

"No," she said slowly. "It took a lot of time."

"Well, I could use a few pointers," he told her, cynicism dripping from his voice. "You'd think I'd learn how to get over these things by now, but I'm still really crap at it."

"I can't tell you _how_, Doctor. You'll have to work that out for yourself."

"Great."

"All I can say is…"

When she didn't continue for a few moments, he encouraged, "What? All you can say is what?"

"All I can say is, the process of getting over you began quite some time before I left. Before we hit Utopia, even. Before the Master and the trip around the world. I had a lot of time to work through it."

"So you didn't still feel that way when you left?"

"I did feel that way when I left," she assured him. "I still loved you completely. But some part of me had moved on. I had, in a manner of speaking, got you out of my system and could then see a life without you. I had given myself a kind of closure already."

The bitterness left his voice, and he pleaded with his eyes. "Did you, at some point, just tell yourself to start giving up? Sheer strength of will? Woke up one morning and said _enough_?"

"No, I didn't just wake up one morning. Something happened."

"What, like a catalyst for healing?"

She smiled mischievously. "If you like."

"What was it?"

She broke eye contact and lost the smile. "I'm not going to say, Doctor. I'm sorry. But I know – _I know_ – it will happen for you too. You can make it happen for yourself, and it will come to you in time."

"It will come to me? Like an epiphany?"

"Just trust me."

"How can I do that? You basically told me a few minutes ago that you came here to break my heart."

"No, I didn't. I came here to give you hope. You just have to see it."

"Right."

"Stop being a child," she scolded. "You can get past this, Doctor. The answer is in your own backyard."


	3. Late Spring, 2007

**Late spring, 2007 (one year earlier)**

"Doctor?" Martha called out. She'd just climbed out of bed a few minutes earlier, after seventeen hours of what had begun as a kip. She couldn't believe how long she'd slept, even given the race-against-time they had encountered on the Finella Asteroid, trying to save the natives before the rock crashed into the neighbouring hostile planet.

Even so, she was glad for it; she didn't even mind the ribbing she might get from the Doctor about how much sleep humans needed. She hadn't had a proper night's sleep since leaving their little niche in 1969. Boring and frustrating though it had been, the one good thing about being trapped in time was the regularity of it, being able to count on certain things, including rest.

She called out his name again. She had already checked the console room, the kitchen, his bedroom and the library. If he wasn't in one of those four places, it was common practise for her to begin shouting. The TARDIS was a big place – might as well not waste time in the maze.

Eventually, she heard his voice. "In here," it said. It was loud enough to be heard, but somehow still distracted.

Distracted – nothing unusual. Rationally speaking, she should expect to hear a flat, disinterested sound in his voice more often than not, but her feelings for him made her wholly irrational where he was concerned. So, every ever-so-slightly unfriendly nuance of his voice, his eyes, his person, they all made her crazy.

She found him in a large round room, wearing one of his usual brown suits, except the jacket had been removed, and hung on the doorknob, and his shirtsleeves had been rolled up. It was unpleasantly warm and humid, and the floor was covered with dirt and greenery. A horseshoe-shaped strip of soil had been cordoned off with string, and the Doctor was on his hands and knees wearing gloves and working with a trowel. Green and brown sticks jutted up, and he pressed at the place where they met the soil, with great care.

"Hi," she said, wandering in with a smile. "You have a garden room in the TARDIS!"

"Yeah," he answered, with that old distraction. A pause, as he stared at his handiwork, and then he said, "Well, not really. This is the Meteorology Lyceum, which I have turned into a garden."

"Meteorology Lyceum?"

"Yes," he answered, looking up at her. "It means the weather can be controlled in this room. It's meant as a teaching facility, but since there's no-one left to teach, I covered it with dirt. I reckoned since I could make it humid and rainy at will…"

"Good place for a garden?"

He nodded, and turned his attention back to his new plants.

"But wait, why would you makeshift a garden?" she asked. "Couldn't the TARDIS just _make_ a proper greenhouse for you?"

The Doctor looked up. He stared at the wall with a thoughtful expression. "S'pose so," he said, turning his head to look at her once more. "Not to mention, having a _literally_ climate-controlled room like this one takes a lot of energy, a lot of memory. I'm sure the old girl would be more than happy to dump this room in favour of a simple greenhouse… hm, well, maybe next year."

Martha looked around. She began slowly stepping round the crawling plants on the ground and inspecting the leaves.

"Checking for Poison Ivy?" the Doctor asked, watching her out of the corner of his eye, as he dug a new shallow hole for a new stick-like plant.

"Maybe," she answered. "My mum kept different vines and ivy. She used to make us help with the upkeep, so I know a little about what I'm looking at. Just seeing what I can see, is all."

"And? See anything interesting?"

"Well, yes, interesting, but nothing I recognise."

"Really? Right there at your left ankle is a Rhododendron," he told her. "That's fairly common. Although, don't eat it – I don't fancy a side-trip to hospital."

She half-heartedly inspected the plant. "Well, you know," she shrugged. "You've probably got plants in here that don't even grow on my home planet. And this room is, what? Several acres? We just had a little patch of backyard in urban London. It wasn't a _lyceum_ of any sort."

Once again, the Doctor looked about thoughtfully. "A backyard," he mused. "Now _that_ is what I would like. Not a greenhouse – a backyard. Real outdoors, real fences… open air is one of the few things the TARDIS can't do."

He sighed and went back to his work. His tone was so blue, she was sorry she'd used the word _backyard _at all. Her heart sank just a little, hearing him talk about what he didn't have. Sure, it was just a patch of ground, but it implied so much more. It implied a settled life, friendly neighbours, a regular place to call home. Martha, of course, felt that the Doctor's adventurous existence was immeasurably better than that of anyone with a mere _backyard_, but she understood that the grass is always greener, and that even bona-fide heroes occasionally longed for a little something normal.

Love means feeling pain when he feels pain, no matter how small or temporary. So, even though she knew that these moments were fleeting, that the Doctor would be back to his old uprooted self in a short while, she felt the need to comfort him.

"Doctor, why would you want a backyard?" she asked. "You've got all of time and space."

He smiled slightly. "I suppose that's true. But I can't get too comfy with that notion – all of time and space as my backyard. I know myself, and that's a dangerous concept."

"Well, then, you've got the TARDIS," she told him. "Infinite space, literally, at your command, to do what you like."

He looked up at her. "That's very true."

"See?"

"But you know, it all goes hand-in-hand," he explained. "Playing with time and space, doing what I like inside the TARDIS…"

"How so?"

"Oh, just…" he began. For a few unpleasant moments, she felt that's all he would say. But eventually, he continued. "Just that there are dangerous things even within the TARDIS. There are places I won't allow myself to go for fear of…"

He didn't have to finish that thought. The Doctor had once explained to her what had happened to his native planet and people, and how afraid he could become, on occasion, of his own, now-singular power. With no one to check him, he'd tried to express to her the damage he could do (and had done) if he let himself. And it didn't take a Time Lord to see that part of that power came from the TARDIS itself.

"…I mean," he went on. "This room is scary enough. Rain, sleet, hail, sun, wind… I could conjure a tornado in here, with the right key strokes at the console. If I really wanted to, I could unleash it outside, level a city."

"Really?"

"Yep," he confirmed.

"What else is in here? In the TARDIS, I mean." she wanted to know.

"Well, the TARDIS is, in essence, a great big computer," he said. "I mean, it's alive, but it's a computer. It houses data."

"Right."

"Computers have input ports, don't they?"

"Yes."

"Ports where other compatible devices can be attached, and data shared."

"Yes, like a USB."

"Exactly." He did not elaborate.

"What about it?" Martha asked.

He seemed to _come to_ then, as though he'd been talking through a trance. He looked hard at her, and then changed his tack. "Never mind. I've probably said too much. Anyway, it doesn't matter because all compatible pieces of machinery are gone. Destroyed with the rest of the planet."

All over again, Martha could hear the tenor of loss in his voice, the absence of what he could have, what he once had.

She scolded herself. She should know better than to allow herself the luxury of a heart-to-hearts of any sort with the Doctor. The problem was, any innocent discussion could turn into a heart-to-hearts for him, any subject could provoke some profoundly hidden pain. If he would share it with her once in a while, she might know where not to go, what not to say. But as it stood, he wouldn't talk about most of it, so Martha flew blind when it came to personal discussions.

And clearly, she had hit a wall, so she changed the subject.

"What have you planted today?" she asked. She reckoned it was an innocent enough question for a man on his hands and knees, planting things in the soil.

"Oh, just some favourites of mine."

Another fairly evasive answer. _Blimey_, she thought, _even botany is a touchy subject_?

"Oh, nice. My favourites are Chrysanthemums."

"Good, I'll remember that."

"Well," she continued, trying to keep her tone light. "This is all very interesting. I wouldn't have pegged you as a gardener."

"I wasn't always," he told her. "This is recent. You see, I don't keep photographs, so…"

"You don't keep photographs of plants?"

"No, that's not what I mean."

When once again he did not elaborate, Martha decided to retreat, beaten. She kicked herself for always staying in the conversation a few beats too long. She sighed. "I guess I'm in your way. I'll go and try to entertain myself…"

"No, no," he said. "You're not in my way. Besides, I'm finished. If you'll help me bring all this rubbish out of here, I'll make us some lunch."

"Sure," she agreed.

The Doctor stood and put on his jacket, while Martha began to gather plastic containers, which once held the stick-like plants he'd put in the ground. He joined her and picked up the trowel, his gardening gloves and the plastic mat he'd used to cushion his knees.

He led her down the hall and to the right, into a corridor she had never seen. It seemed to go on forever, and she wondered what dangerous ports of power lurked behind those doors.

"Big backyard," she quipped. "How do you keep it mown?"

He chuckled and opened a door. "This is gardening equipment. The one across the hall is recycling. Go ahead and toss those containers into the compactor."

"Gotcha."

She went into the recycling room and shut the door behind her. She opened the door on the dishwasher-like device labelled _Compactor_.

And just before tossing the black plastic trays in, something caught her ear and eye. A small rattling sound got her attention, along with the little white plastic pieces making the sound. They were the labels that had come with the plants, identifying the species for the gardener and buyer.

She examined them. _"Rosa Xanthina _and _Rosa Meijocos_," she whispered to herself, examining them. "Yellow and pink roses."

She gulped down an impulsive bout of emotion; whether it was a sob or a scream, she did not know. She realised all at once, the Doctor had _recently_ decided to develop a garden of his _favourites._ He didn't keep photos, which, in context, implied that his garden is a place of remembrance. He wanted somewhere to go to whisper and weep, to entrench himself in melancholy memories.

Yellow and Pink Roses.

Just when she thought she'd developed her own, albeit strained, rapport with the Doctor, _that name_ came back to haunt them. Haunt _her._

Love means feeling pain when he feels pain, even if it's reminiscences invoking jealousy. She'd long since accepted the bitterness, and now shoved it down into the pit of her stomach, hiding with every other damned feeling she'd ever had for the Doctor.


	4. Early Summer, 2008

**Early Summer, 2008**

Eight hundred-odd years of knocking about in this old box, most of that time with a partner or a companion of some sort. He had travelled with all sorts of men and women, from a variety of planets, a few different time periods, and with infinitely different personalities. Each one of them had been brilliant, each unique. The one thing they had in common was that he had eventually been forced to say goodbye to all of them, and move on without them.

Their manners of departure had been as varied as their personal quirks. He'd had companions get burned out, get married, decide to stay behind to help. He'd left a few behind himself, sometimes for their own good, sometimes because they had pissed him off, usually because there had been no other choice. Some of them had not been his to keep, and some of them had refused even to begin the adventure. Companions leave, they get lost in other dimensions, sometimes they die.

All these disasters he could deal with, because, at the end of the day, no matter what happened, he could sleep easy knowing that he had made an imprint on them, almost always for the better. Even if he had wrecked their lives, got them captured, tortured or body-swapped, he knew that the colour of his life would always be stamped upon their souls. It was a kind of immortality to him, to each of his regenerations, in fact. This was something that made his very long, potentially monotonous, existence worthwhile and wonderful.

But then there was Donna. She was the only one who had ever _forgotten him_. She was the one who would never be able to think of him, use what she'd learned from him, from other planets, from other times. She was the only one about whom he would think, and then say to himself, "What a waste." No vestige of him could stay with her, no thought nor whim of hers could ever run to the Doctor again. In short, he had put himself out there for her, and lost, and it made him want to retreat.

So, the TARDIS was into its fifteenth day now, parked in stasis – nowhere and no-when to go. The Doctor was staying in. He couldn't hope to save a planet or divert a black hole in this state; he'd be too much at risk of throwing the match, and taking a whole civilization down with him.

He wandered the TARDIS frequently during this time, not looking for anything in particular – just wandered. Sometimes he'd stick his head into a room when he couldn't remember what was inside, and occasionally, he'd get involved in that room, in going through stacks of things, unpacking memories for better or for worse. But most of the time, he was detached and just meandered. This singular grief, of a kind he'd never felt before, had given him an aimlessness. He couldn't find purchase anywhere, no leverage. Because when he thought about the things that might comfort him, he came up with nothing. Not that he couldn't think of anything, it's just that it was all impossible. Nothing could bring Donna back as he had known her, and nothing could…

Well, now, _there_ was a truly useless thought. Amid the storm of angst over Donna, there existed a temporarily buried, though slowly re-emerging, desire to be comforted by _another_ companion. Another whom he couldn't have, another whose world had kept on turning without him. Sure, he could turn to her for a cathartic chat in a time of crisis, as she had demonstrated to him after he'd lost Jenny in the battle on Messaline. But the kind of comfort he wanted from her was something she'd made clear that she was no longer willing to give.

And what had made it all so much worse was the horrible bloody _timing_ of it. For a year, he'd lived with her in this vessel, either oblivious to, or intentionally running away from, her love for him. For a year, he had existed side-by-side with beautiful, beautiful Martha, never bothering to let her in, constantly making her feel inferior. And when she finally up and left and found someone else, someone normal who could see her for the phenomenal life partner she could be, _then_ he decided he wants her. He reckoned that in this situation, normal guys might think, "If only I had a time machine."

Well, he had one, but...

Instead, he thought, "If only I didn't know quite so much about the laws of time and space." Then maybe he could break them.

And what made it worse, even, than that, was the high-road tone she had taken when he'd tried to confess his feelings. She had been strong, mature, clearly not the girl he'd picked up in that alley after her brother's birthday do. Wasn't _he_ supposed to be the wise one, giving cryptic advice, confusing the hell out of his friends? Wasn't _he _supposed to remind _them_ of his unique lot in life, as a man who would eventually, inevitably outlive everyone he cared about? What was she talking about when she'd said that the process of getting over him had begun well before she left, and that something had _happened_ to her as a _catalyst for healing_? And more importantly, why wouldn't she tell him what it was? Why wouldn't she help? How could she just send him on his way with the condescending counsel that it would all become clear to him in time, and that the answer was in his own backyard? How smug could one person get?

Come to think of it... did he really even _like _her anymore?

Who was he kidding? Of course he did. The mystery of it, the unattainable nature of it, it all made him even more desperate to have her, to be with her, be back in her life, having her run with him again, having her heart pumping with his, having her drowning in adrenaline alongside him, having their eyes lock in an intense moment, and an unspoken message pass between them, oscillating on the air from his consciousness into hers...

As he wandered the halls of the TARDIS, he might have slapped himself over the head for this train of thought, but he was actually glad for a bit of respite from feeling rotten about Donna.

And anyway, he had come to a familiar door. The Meteorology Lyceum. The garden, his only real shrine of remembrance.

He went inside and admired his handiwork. The horseshoe-shaped flowerbed was covered in Chrysanthemums, ones he had planted just after leaving Messaline. They were, fittingly, looking strong and beautiful, growing and flourishing. Also fittingly, they were accomplishing all of this without him, as he had set the weather system to rain upon them at regular, carefully-meted, intervals.

He walked along the outskirts of the room, where the roses grew, having been transplanted in favour of the Chrysanthemums. He began to make plans to clear a space near the front for some pumpkins, and thought he might have to rearrange some of the current front pieces in order to accomplish it.

He crouched, and fingered the Rhododendron, reckoned it might be time to get rid of it, as the new arrangement came into play.

And a conversation came back to him. Rhododendron...

Martha had not been able to identify it, the one and only time she had been in this room. And why not? Her mother's backyard garden had not been as large as this room... she didn't know _every single_ plant there was.

Backyard.

The TARDIS was his backyard, she had told him back then, even though it could not give him open air.

The answer was in his own backyard, she had advised him just a month or so ago, as she tried to help him feel better about his unrequited love.

She wasn't being frustratingly cryptic; she had given him a fairly explicit message. Well, what do you know?

She had experienced something important, something she was sure he'd have as well, and the answer was in his own backyard...

He got to his feet, forgetting the plants. It was time to wander again, only this time, with a goal. He had no idea what, in the way of healing, his TARDIS could offer, but he reckoned he'd know it when he saw it.

And he did. A door with a tiny carving just below the knob: the letters MJ. He knew she wouldn't just walk around graffiti-ing random doors in the TARDIS for no good reason.

"No way," he muttered to himself. He stepped toward the door, knowing that exactly what he shouldn't do was exactly what he was going to do. "Oh, Doctor. You are definitely going to time traveller's hell for this."


	5. Late Spring, 2007 2

**Late Spring, 2007**

_Martha sighed happily, and looked up at the tall man walking next to her. He smiled back at her, one of those eye-crinkling, teeth-bearing smiles that showed, beyond doubt, that he was happy. He was rarely ever happy when he wasn't involved in some unsolvable mystery – except now. Today, with her, he was happy. They held hands and wandered aimlessly through a meadow, on some foreign planet, far away from everything. The grass came to their knees – it was a soft, accommodating grass that nipped at Martha's bare legs and gave her a tingle every time she stepped. The white sun radiated warmth from outside the intoxicating perfumed atmosphere._

"_The grass feels wonderful," she commented._

"_All the more wonderful if you take off your shoes," he told her. She stopped walking and followed his suggestion, leaving her sandals behind. The grass was cool, and plush enough to slink between her toes, and another little tingle took her over. She giggled, and they continued to walk._

"_The sun is clear and warm," she said to him._

"_All the clearer if you get rid of your sweater," he suggested. They stopped again, and she shimmied out of her peach-blossom-coloured cardigan. It too, she left behind. The rays felt exquisite on her shoulders and arms, like a fingerless massage. She was left in a short skirt and tank top, and she felt free._

"_The air is sweet," she mused. Then she took a nice long whiff. "It tastes like rain and wildflowers."_

"_All the sweeter if you let go of your fears," he whispered._

"_Excuse me?" she asked, smiling, though not without confusion._

"_You can taste sweetness," he explained. "But you have to let go of your fears, you have to trust me. I can give you more."_

"_I trust you. I'm not afraid."_

"_Close your eyes."_

_She closed her eyes, and her senses were filled with the most wonderful vibrations, the clearest warmth and the sweetest taste. The threads of his suit pressed against her exposed flesh made her tremble. The heat of his body so close to hers made her want to melt into him. His lips, she never wanted to give up – so sweet, so perfect…_

_And then she felt the ground move. It was almost as if the soil behind her were rising up behind her like a hospital bed. Suddenly she felt that wonderful soft, cool grass against her back. She felt pressed, the most pleasant of pressures, sandwiched between that suit and the ground, the taste of him still flooding her._

_Then he pulled away and looked down at her._

"_You are spectacular," she told him._

"_All the more spectacular if you remove everything," he said, fluttering one eyebrow. "Or let me do it."_

_Breathlessly, she nodded, now unable to speak._

_Slowly, he tugged her skirt down over her legs, planting infuriating kisses all the way down as he went, from her abdomen just above where the waistband rested, down to her toes where the garment touched her last. He repeated the action with her top, pushing upwards, kissing her all the way up from her navel to her neck to her fingertips held over her head. And then her knickers went, only this time he simply tugged and they were gone. He spent a little time running his fingertips over the sensitive, hot flesh beneath. By the time he finished, she was quivering and barely conscious. She felt drunk, her vision blurred, any thoughts she had were inarticulate. Anything she could now understand was about desire, what her body wanted._

_She was naked upon that wonderful grass, that warm sun, at the mercy of those sweet lips._

_He sat up, and seemed to swirl slowly into a cloud of mist as he shrugged off his jacket, tugged at his tie, popped off the buttons of his shirt and threw it aside, and then reached for his zip…_

_The cloud of flesh descended upon her. His being enveloped her, and she felt nothing but pleasure. Wonder, warmth, sweetness. She closed her eyes and swam in it._

_But then…_

"_Ouch!" she cried. She felt a prickly pain against her back. Then another, then another, then several all at once. "Ow! What the hell?"_

_The prickling spread to her bum, her legs, across her body to her arms and torso. "Ow! What are you doing to me?" she shrieked._

_Her eyes flew open, and she was alone. No cloud, no pleasure, no clothes. All she could see were green vines, wrapping round round her, and all she could feel were thorns, tightening, closing in._

_Thorns! And shades of yellow and pink poking through the gaps._

_The rosebush had got out of control!_

_And the prickles were drawing blood._

_But where had there been a rosebush? This seemed to come out of nowhere!_

_But no, she realised, it had been behind them, when they'd first entered the meadow, but he had told her not to worry about it. _

_Don't worry, indeed! He'd said _trust me, let go of your fears! _Martha had let her guard down, and so had he – they had invited this! It's prickly and angry, and apparently, can chase them everywhere they go! She was suffocating! Losing blood! Passing out!_

_But what had it done to him? He'd been right here with her, and then the thorns… and now their tryst was over, and she was enveloped in the unpleasantness of…_

* * *

"Ow!" she cried out, sitting up.

She looked around her bedroom and sighed. High ceilings, white walls, not a plant in sight.

Then she cursed. Bloody thorns.

She tried to lie back down again, but she could swear she felt the prickling against her backside still, the pressure of something pushing her down, into an angry vine full of needle-like protrusions.

A physical manifestation of how she felt emotionally _all the time._

The dreams she could handle – sometimes she rather liked them. But so often they ended with an interruption just like this one. Never in her dreams did she have the chance to confront the offending entity herself, she reckoned, because she'd never actually seen her – it was always metaphors.

It had begun with Shakespearean vixens and sorceresses, spiriting the Doctor away. Then it had been skies with pink sunsets, distracting him, luring him into the horizon.

Only recently had the metaphor become _this_ bloody obvious.

Suddenly, Martha felt very tense, as though sleep were a thing that was far away, in the outer reaches of a drowsily spinning galaxy.

And so… a good, long walk. Since secondary school, it had been Martha's way to combat insomnia. If she couldn't sleep for being too wound up over that book report on _Heart of Darkness,_ she'd take a stroll, nice and rhythmic. As long as she didn't walk too fast, get too much adrenaline pumping, she would be struggling to keep her eyes open by the time she trudged back through the front door. She'd never told her parents about these walks; they would have worried about her safety, of course, and they wouldn't be entirely wrong. But it was the only thing Martha had ever found that worked every time, apart from alcohol.

It was true, one of the few things that the TARDIS could not provide was real, proper open air. At first when she couldn't sleep while travelling with the Doctor, she would toss and turn and never quite find respite, just because she couldn't go take a midnight spin round the block. Though, eventually she realised that the TARDIS was infinite space. She could take a longer walk in here than she could in London. Once she'd worked out the basic floor-plan and could guarantee that she'd find her way back to her bedroom, the revelation had been a godsend to her, especially after her night-time angst over unrequited love began to escalate.

She slid her feet into a pair of flip-flops, pulled her threadbare pink robe over her black nightgown and began to walk.

She took the same few routes every time, two of them stemmed from a left turn out of her bedroom, and one of them stemmed from a right turn. This night, she took one of the former. A left turn, then an almost immediate right set her en route to some sort of disused ballroom with red velvet chairs and a chandelier that would put most opera houses to shame. She reckoned she'd go in, take a spin round the room, maybe practice her practically-forgotten ballet moves on the polished parquet, and head slowly back to bed.

Halfway there, something caught her eye. An ordinary door which she must have seen a hundred times but never noticed, tonight had a green light on, over the doorjamb. It flickered every now and then, and a strange humming sound came from inside, along with a slight otherworldly _whoosh_, something that sounded like the familiar TARDIS gears when it was grinding and working.

She approached the door. "Doctor?" she said, a little more loudly than her normal voice.

There was no answer, only the sound of something happening inside the room.

"Doctor?" she said again.

"Yeah!" his voice said from inside.

"What are you doing? Can I come in?" she asked.

"Yes, come in!" he called.

She opened the door, and stepped inside. "Wha…" she began, looking round.

"Shut the door," the Doctor commanded. "Please."

"Okay," she said. "What are you doing up? I thought you went to sleep when I did."

"Yeah, well, I probably did," he said, moving about the room. "You all right?"

She shrugged. "Fine. Just couldn't sleep."

"Why not?"

"Just, you know," she said, looking sad. "Thinking about stuff."

"I'm sorry," he told her. He stopped moving and looked squarely at her, his brown eyes matching hers, sadness for sadness. "Really, I'm sorry. Is there anything I can do?"

"Erm, no," she lied. "It's just a bit of insomnia."

"Are you sure?"

"Why wouldn't I be sure?"

"I dunno," he said. "I thought maybe…"

"What have you done to your hair?" she asked, squinting.

He touched his spiky locks with the palm of his hand. "What's wrong with it?"

"Well, nothing," she answered. "It's just… well, if it's possible, it's even bigger than when I saw you this evening."

"Oh," he said, a bit self-consciously. "It's different than you recognise?"

"A little. I mean, I like it."

"You do?"

"Yes, of course."

He smiled a bit. "Thanks. Give me a minute, okay?"

She nodded as he went back to whatever he'd been doing.

She took the opportunity to examine her surroundings. What she saw was basically a control room, or more accurately, a circuit room. Thick wires and cables stretched across the walls and ceiling, and every few feet, a metal notch would seem to conduct electricity and either pulsate, or brim with power and connect with another notch, through what looked like a mini bolt of lightning. In the middle of the room, there was a circular control board, though not like the one in the TARDIS' console room. This one was shaped like a doughnut, and all the buttons and levers were on the inside. One narrow opening figured on Martha's right-hand side, and one on the left, and the Doctor was inside the ring, throwing switches and talking to himself.

She approached the control board. She noticed as the Doctor bolted about, that the doughnut was symmetrical. On one of the panels, there was a large, flashing purple button, over a row of numbered red lights, and a white sign labelled "Magnetism Level." On the other side of the doughnut, the same board existed, though the purple button was flashing at different intervals.

When she looked about the whole room, she realised the entire room was like that: symmetrical. Above her head was a row of metal outcroppings, two green, two blue and the rest silver. On the other side of the room, the same thing. On her left, on the wall, there was an electrical box, labelled "Emergency Only." Same thing on the opposite side of the room. And of course, a door, opposite the door through which she had just entered.

"Doctor, is this room meant for two operators or something?"

He looked up at her, surprised. Then he smiled. "No, but that's brilliant. You're brilliant, you are."

Now it was her turn to be surprised. "Thanks."

"And I'm such an idiot," he sighed, looking her up and down.

This made her uncomfortable. "Doctor, what's going on?"

"I'll tell you in a minute," he said. Then he handed her a sharpened kitchen knife. "But before I do, the first thing I need from you is to go out and carve your initials on the other side of that door behind you."

"What?" she asked, dumbfounded, taking the knife.

"Just under the doorknob. Go on."


	6. Early Summer, 2008 2

She came back inside with a quizzical look on her face and handed him the kitchen knife. "Okay, that's done. And speaking of which, what _is_ that all about?" she asked, gesturing toward the door with her thumb.

"I'll explain later," he told her, grabbing her hand. He pulled her over to the opposite side of the room, through the opposite door from the one through which she had come. She stumbled a little in her flip-flops, but he caught her. As she fell against him, their eyes met for a moment.

After a few seconds, Martha seemed to remember herself, and she looked away, as she always did in moments like this one – as she always had, back then.

"What?" she asked, sheepishly, shrugging out of his grip. She sniffed, dusting off her nose self-consciously with one hand.

"Nothing, it's just…" he said, smiling. The grin spread across his face, and he reminded her of the mischievous Cheshire Cat. "…I know something you don't."

She took a step back and looked at him, scowling a little, quite annoyed. "Well, what else is new?"

"Sorry," he retorted, becoming immediately serious. He'd forgotten who he was dealing with, and that he was seeing her now from a different point of view. From the wrong point of view, he reminded himself. He could now see, like a flashing neon sign, the deflated love in her eyes, the pain she felt when she looked at him. How had he missed it when he'd travelled with her? "I just… sorry."

Wasn't there some kind of middle ground? Was it either _this_ Martha, or the other? This Martha, the one who hurt so much it made him hurt, the one who looked at him and saw the painfully unattainable, and was afraid to say or do anything untoward, afraid to indulge in an unguarded moment, reveal anything…

Or the other, whose eyes were bright with confidence, with the conspicuous light of not needing him, whose life had flourished, granted, because of him, but even more so without him, whose affections and desires had transferred elsewhere by now…

Couldn't there be an in-between Martha? A Martha 1.5, as it were, one who desired him, but didn't regard him as a brick wall or a knife in the heart?

Well, that's what he was here to find out. That's what he was here to create, for her sake, and for himself. He liked to think that the strong, confident Martha could not exist without this step. He knew for sure that a got-over-it Doctor couldn't.

"So, seriously, what are you doing up?" she wanted to know. She pulled her robe tightly around herself and cinched it at the waist.

"I'm er… working on a project."

"Yeah?"

"Yes," he said. "Something long-term. Sort of."

"Okay. Do you need me for said project?" she wanted to know.

"Absolutely," he assured her. "Couldn't do it without you."

"Really?" she asked, sceptically.

"Mm," he nodded. "Come on."

He took her hand once more, and she frowned, eyeing their two hands clasped together. For a few moments, she walked a pace behind him, rather dumbfounded to be holding his hand in this unguarded moment. More accurately, _he _was holding onto _her_ hand.

Eventually, she caught up with him, and looked around. She glanced back at the door they had just shut behind them, and she could swear that this was the same hallway she had come through on her midnight walk. But that was impossible, since they had exited through the door opposite.

Actually, it was impossible in a normal space. In the TARDIS, well…

"Doctor, does the TARDIS have, like… portals, or something?"

"What makes you ask that?" he said, brusquely, avoiding her eye.

"This hallway… I just came through it."

"Well, of course you did. You came to the interface room, didn't you? And now we're leaving the interface room."

"Yeah, but you pulled me out through a different door, and now we're back in the same spot. Did we cross over a wormhole? Is there a such thing as wormholes?"

"Yes, but they're called temporal cones," he corrected. "No-one calls them wormholes. And no, we didn't cross over one."

"Then what…"

"I said I'd explain, and I will."

Martha half expected to come around the corner and be back in the same spot outside what the Doctor had called the interface room, but he pulled her down two more familiar corridors, and they looked exactly as they should. Save for the Doctor pulling her along, it could have been just a continuation of her insomnia stroll.

And then they arrived at, apparently, a destination. The Doctor stopped and looked at the door.

"Do you remember this room?" he asked.

"Yeah, it's the garden," she said. "The… what is it? The Meteorology Lyceum?"

"Right. There's something important I need to show you."

"Great," she sighed.

He saw it again, the rejection flashing across her face. The last time she'd been in that room, he reckoned, the whole front horseshoe had been covered in roses. A nice flower, but far too potent a symbol to exist peacefully in the TARDIS.

He shook off the regret, and spoke.

"But before I do that, there's something even more important that I need to tell you."

"Okay."

His eyes were open wide, but they were penetrating like lasers. His breath had gone short; Martha could see that he was nervous about whatever it was he had to say.

"I'm not who you think I am," he blurted.

"What?" she blurted back, alarmed.

"No, wait, that's not right," he corrected, making a sort of _erase all_ gesture with his hands. "I'm who you think I am. I'm just not _from_ where you think I'm _from._"

She put one hand on her hip in a display of tedium. "Doctor, what are you playing at?"

"Well, frankly, something for which my people would have me exiled to the Condensate Wilderness," he said. "So it's a good thing they're not here, eh? Well, not most of them anyway. Well, actually none of them now."

"Doctor."

"Sorry. Okay, the interface room… do you remember when we were in the garden, and I was planting the rosebushes?"

"Yeah."

"Of course you'd remember that. Do you remember I said there were rooms in the TARDIS that… well, I think I said something about sharing data."

"Yeah, you said the TARDIS was a big computer," she recalled. "And you likened parts of it to a USB device."

"Well, the interface room is just such a device. It's meant to share data with other TARDISes."

"Like, another TARDIS' interface room could plug in, and the two vehicles could be joined, and made into one big ship?"

"Well, one big computer, more accurately. Except there are no other TARDISes. There's only mine. At different points in time. Do you understand what I'm saying?"

She nodded slowly, as her eyes widened. "Yeah, I understand what you're saying. Your people would be right to exile you!"

"I know, I know, but it's for a good cause, I promise."

"You're the Doctor from another time! And this is the TARDIS from another time!" she shouted. "You are interfacing your TARDIS with itself at different points in time, so that you can… what?"

"So I can talk to you."

"Talk to me? Don't I exist in your time?" she asked hastily. Then a realisation hit her. "Or… am I dead in your time? Or, like a hundred years old, or something?"

"No, you're fine," he said. "I'm only one year away from you, Martha. Technically anyway. On our personal timelines, and Jack's, it's more like two because of… well, you'll find out."

"Who's Jack?"

"Never mind. Just trust me – there are things happening in my life now that coincide with your life… now."

She closed her eyes. "What?"

"I'm the Doctor 2.0, as it were, and you are Martha 1.0. You and I have things in common that the Doctor 1.0 and _you_ do not, and same for Martha 2.0 and me. D'you follow?"

She looked at the ceiling and thought about it for approximately two seconds. "No."

He took a deep breath, and asked the question. It was the same question he'd asked a different version of the same woman, just a couple of months before.

"Martha, how do you feel about me?"

She stared at him, and it was impossible to read her expression. Clearly, she was taken aback, but whether she wanted to laugh, burst into tears or hit him with a mallet, he could not tell.

"Hello?" he asked, searching her face for a clue.

"Hello, what?"

"I'm just seeing if you're alive, or if I've short-circuited you."

"A little of both, actually."

"Well?"

"Well what, Doctor?"

"How do you feel about me."

Her eyes welled up. He was hurting her, making it difficult for her. "If you're asking that question…" she said, her voice breaking. She tried to get her emotion under control, and she wound up, and tried again. "If you're asking that question, then you must already know."

"I see."

"No, I take that back," she said, taking a few steps away. She turned from him and began to pace. "If you'd even _dare_ to wonder at the answer to that question, Doctor, it just proves how little you know, and how much of a moron I am!"

"No, Martha, listen…"

"I thought I'd made it clear, whether I wanted to or not," she said. "I know we skirted around the issue after the whole John Smith fiasco, but… _I know_ you remember what I said in that house."

"I do remember," he said.

"So what are you doing to me?" she pleaded. Tears flowed freely now.

He groaned. The tears hurt him to see, especially now that he knew first-hand how she felt. And even more than that, he knew that he had caused them.

"I'm not trying to do anything to you," he said. "I brought you here to do something _for_ you. And for myself. Because in the long run, it would never work, so we both need to get on the path toward healing and… well, I'm not entirely sure how to do it, but I know that being here with you is the first step."

She leaned against the wall and wiped her tears. "I have no idea what you're talking about," she said flatly, not looking at him. "Healing from what?"

He reached out and opened the door to the Lyceum. He gestured. "Please, step inside."

"Why?"

His free arm fell to his side. "Would you just do it? Please?"

She sighed, and obeyed reluctantly. She entered the garden, and the horseshoe of bright red flowers caught her eye immediately.

"Chrysanthemums," she whispered, before turning to the Doctor. She looked at him almost imploringly.

He just nodded.


	7. Early Summer, 2008 3

In a large, humid room, Martha sat cross-legged on flagstones and stared down at the cuff of her jeans. The Doctor sat beside her, also cross-legged, and stared at her. Around them was a large horseshoe of red Chrysanthemums. They had just had a difficult discussion…

More accurately, the Doctor had spoken on a difficult topic, and Martha had listened, and reacted when necessary.

And now she had gone mute.

"Are you all right?" he asked her, after a long, long silence.

"Yep," she said. He wasn't convinced.

Not that he was surprised. He hadn't exactly expected her to jump for joy at this revelation, in spite of how he knew she felt about him.

"Well, please say something, Martha," he said. "You're making me nervous."

"What would you like me to say?"

"Whatever you're thinking."

"Your timing is really crap, you know that?"

"It has occurred to me, yes," he answered, practically at a growl.

"This is so stupid," she sighed. "So stupid."

"Yep. I'm the guy who knows about time, and not only can I not get my own timeline sorted out so that I feel things when I supposed to, I mess with the natural order of things on other people's timelines as well."

She looked at him squarely. "You don't seem that bothered."

"I'm bothered," he assured her quietly.

"But you've thought this out," she reasoned. "And decided it was work the risk, just because now, you... How very responsible of you."

"Martha…"

"What are we risking here, Doctor? A time paradox?"

"Pretty much."

"Destruction of the universe?"

"Parts of it, _maybe. _It's not very likely at all, not if we're very, very careful. But I've taken all the precautions, and you can just leave it to me."

Her jaw dropped and her eyes were pleading. "We could destroy parts of the universe, just sitting here together with your TARDIS hooked up to ours, and… wow. You've finally gone the way of the loon, Doctor."

"It's highly _highly _unlikely. The chances are... well, they're calculable, but they're small."

She just shook her head and buried her face in her hands. "Unbelievable."

He moved round in front of her, taking her by the shoulders. "Martha, listen to me. It's worth the risk to have you know…" he said, then choked. He started again. "To have you know that I love you. And to have you hear it at a time when you need to hear it. Do you understand what I'm saying?"

"Yes," she whispered, almost unable even to croak the word out. She looked at him with her eyes swimming in tears. "Say it again."

"I love you?" he asked.

She nodded and her face distorted as a sob overtook her, and she tried to hold it back.

He knew that these tears were not tears of sadness, or particularly of joy. They were manifestations of a complex mix of emotions. Love and disgust, relief and doubt, and the overwhelming feeling of being ultimately doomed. He knew because he felt all these things, and he felt a little like crying himself.

He maneuvered himself back into a seated position to the side of her, and facing her, and he pulled her toward him.

She allowed him to comfort her, and she cried briefly into his shoulder. He stroked her hair, kissed the top of her head, and took the opportunity to take in her scent. A hundred times he had noticed how she smelled, how sweet she was, and uniquely womanly. And a hundred times, he had dismissed it as a passing fancy, barely even registering it consciously. But today, with the old Martha Jones, the one he knew and loved, it awakened something within… and without.

And that surprised him.

He had acknowledged a while back that he loved her. This was the first time he had consciously realised how much, how badly he _wanted_ her. In this moment, he had to fight the urge to run his hands down her body, drive his tongue desperately into her mouth and do things to her in the Chrysanthemum patch that would definitely necessitate re-planting. He knew she wouldn't fight him – at least not for long. He knew he could have her if he wanted her, right now, with no ceremony or circumstance. And this would be a terrific moment for it, this pocket of tenderness in their lives, complete with tears and revelations and angst. He had said he loved her, and he knew she loved him – what more did they need?

But when he pictured it, the delicious thrashing in the flowers, he couldn't help but also hear her in his mind, asking if he had _really_ just endangered the fabric of reality for a quick shag. And she'd be right to ask it – it would be a valid question. And in point of fact, the answer was no.

And an even better question was this: how are two people, even if they're in love, supposed to have any kind of rapport when they don't even belong in the same time? Or species? Or when one of them will outlive the other possibly by thousands of years?

_These_ were the fears he had come here to quell. These were the issues that they needed to work through, in order to realise that there could be no "rapport," other than the one they already had. The process of _getting over_ each other was what needed to happen now.

"Martha," he said, pulling away from the embrace. "Talk to me. I think it's important that we talk."

"About what?" she asked.

"Tell me…" he said, the hesitated. He had no idea how to begin this discussion. "Tell me your fears."

"My fears?"

"Yes. Or your concerns, whatever," he said. "You must have… concerns. About us."

She laughed mirthlessly. "Well yeah," she replied, practically spitting out the words. "Starting with the fact that… _you_, the real you, or the _current _you… _he_ doesn't love me! And if _you_ do, that's almost worse!"

"How is it worse?" he asked, calmly, like a therapist.

"Because if I just knew that I didn't have a shot, that would be one thing," she told him. "I could live with that. Been living with that for almost a year."

"I'm sorry," he whispered.

"But to think that we just… missed our chance? Or more accurately, _you _missed _your_ chance? It's like, I don't know, like being given a taste of something and then having it taken away. The same way that a slow gentle death is worse than a quick and brutal one."

"I get it," he told her. "We need to work through that."

"Work through it? Are you kidding me? Are you really the same Doctor?" she asked, getting to her feet. "Mr. Sullen-and-Tragic suddenly wants to work through it? For almost a year, you've only spoken to me in any meaningful way when you've been goddamn good and ready!"

He stood up along with her. "Martha, I know…"

"And how the hell are we supposed to work through it? What, I just come live with you in the wrong time period? Tell my current Doctor that I'm going into the back of the TARDIS for a pack of cigarettes, and just never come back?"

"I didn't say we needed to solve the problem, Martha," he said. "Just work through it with words, so we can get past it, and not be tortured by it."

"Well, here are the words: You don't love me, not at the right time. We can never be together in the way I would want – period. Next topic."

He sighed. "There's more to it than that."

"Yeah, well, maybe I'm not goddamn good and ready," she spat, crossing her arms across her chest.

"Then let me talk."

"No, this is too much, and it's stupid," she insisted, again. "Why did you bring me here?"

"To tell you I love you," he repeated softly, for lack of anything better to say.

"Well," she sighed. "I love you, too. Is that all? I have a life to get back to."

"No, that's not all, because your future counterpart, my current Martha as you would say, told me this needed to happen. You and I… we can't be together. We both know it. You're still human and I'm still a Time Lord – it doesn't work. It's not meant to work. But _you_ receive some kind of closure that allows you to move on, and you told me it would happen for me as well. So that's why I brought you here."

"Well, future Martha was wrong," she said obstinately. "Doctor, hearing you say you love me… it was wonderful. Like music. But…"

"I know… makes it worse. I'm sorry. But closure, Martha. It's important. And you can say what you like – it will happen. So I need your cooperation."

"You need my cooperation? Oh, very romantic."

"Please, work with me, here."

"All right then. The first thing I need to know, before anything else is: Why didn't you love me back then? In _my _time? Am I not pretty enough? Not clever enough? Were you not aware of my feelings?"

"Don't be silly. I thought you were beautiful and brilliant, and I knew how you felt."

"Then why?"

"I don't know," he confessed. "It's not like I never thought about it back then. A man can't live with a beautiful woman in close quarters for a year without having it occur to him more than once that there might be a possibility there. I just didn't feel it. Don't know why."

"Okay. Well, until you do, I don't see how I can coherently discuss anything else. I don't see how to work through the human-Time-Lord dilemma either, other than to tell ourselves over and over again that it would never work for us in the long-term, even if we _didn't_ have this universe-ending paradox problem. "

"I told you: it's very, very unlikely that this will end the universe, or even part of it."

She ignored the remark. "But even if there is a way, I have to know the answer to question number one first."

"Okay," he gulped. "Fair enough." He stuck his hands diffidently into his pockets and looked at his shuffling trainers upon the flagstones.

"So what now?"

"I guess we won't have closure in one session," he said.

"One session?" she laughed in spite of herself. "Is this therapy?"

He smirked. "We're both doctors. Well, you're not yet, but you will be. So yeah – why not?"

She smiled a little, again, in spite of herself.

"Okay, well, one other reason why I brought you here was to give you this," he said. He pulled a trinket from his pocket, and showed it to her.

"What is it?" she asked. It looked like pink quartz in the shape of a teardrop, about the size of a penny. One side of the teardrop looked as though it had been flattened, and then a tiny checkerboard pattern had been carved out.

"It's a pin," he said. He carefully took the boat neck of her nightgown between his fingers, and pinned the trinket on the inside. "You wear it inside, against your skin. And look – I have the other half." He extracted a seemingly identical pin from the other pocket, and held it to hers. When the two checkerboards were pressed together, the pieces fit like a puzzle, and the two halves formed a heart. It was so sickeningly sweet, yet Martha couldn't help but smile.

"Like a BFF pendant," she teased.

"Yeah, bit different," he said. "This one is special. It has… properties. And best of all, my people made it, so it works across time."

"Properties?"

"Well, yeah," he said. "You use it when you don't want to lose someone. Literally. The two halves can always find each other. It's one of the few truly touchy-feely things the Time Lords ever came up with."

"Oh," she said, pulling it away from her skin so she could see it. "That's nice. How does it work?"

"It will glow when I'm thinking about you, and mine will glow when you're thinking about me."

"Well, considering I still live with you," she reasoned. "Yours will glow all the time."

"Yep. And so, even if I never get to see _you _again, even if all I ever get is the Martha who has moved on, I'll still know that I could always find you again, and I'll know what you're thinking."

"Couldn't you find me again anyway, 'cause you can track your TARDIS?"

He sighed. "Yes, but…" He clicked his tongue in mild exasperation. "You're missing the point, Martha. This is symbolic. I mean, theoretically it should mean that you could find me anywhere in time too, but since you could never do that on your own, the whole thing really is pointless in a practical sense. It's not practical, it's beautiful. And the beauty is that it keeps a connection between us. You and me. Not him and her."

"Okay," she said, her face melting now into a genuinely warm smile. She put her hand on his shoulder, and he bent so she could kiss his cheek. "It's very sweet."

"Promise you'll wear it?"

"Yes, I promise," she conceded sheepishly.

"Got to keep it hidden. I'll recognise it if I see it on you. I mean, in your time."

"I know – I'll be careful. You'll wear yours too?"

"Absolutely."

"Of course. How else could you stalk me across time and space?" she asked.

"That's not what this is…"

"I'm joking, Doctor."

* * *

Hours after she was gone, the Doctor sat on the black leather seat with his legs extended and feet propped up on the console. He turned his half of the pink pin over and over in his fingers, watching it glow.

Where Martha was concerned, he was fairly used to feeling pangs of guilt. But this guilt was a new kind of guilt. It had nothing to do with opportunities lost, and unnecessary suffering. It had to do with deception.

He tried to tell himself that he hadn't _exactly_ lied to her about what the pin does, he just hadn't told her the whole truth.


	8. Late Spring, 2007 3

**Hello, friends!**

**I must admit, for the first time in a long, long while, I had abandoned a story. I had made a conscious decision that I wasn't coming back to "Crossroads" because I had lost my train of thought on it, it had gone to a place where I wasn't sure I could bring it back from. And then some stuff happened in my personal life that made me even less willing to work on it. I even almost deleted it from ffn! But the reviews and favorites kept coming in steadily, leaving always a shimmer of doubt - should I come back? Should I retool my outline and bother to try and finish?**

**Well, the answer is yes! I should! And I think I can! Thank you to a few of you "fans" out there who reminded me via personal messages and other reviews that this endeavor is actually worth something. Thank you! I am "feeling" this story again!**

* * *

**Late spring, 2007**

The Doctor's "magical" pin glowed a lot more often than she had expected it would. It glowed for at least two-thirds of the day, and shone in various colours – deep blue, mystic white, bright red, and a whole rainbow of other hues in-between. That was another thing she hadn't expected, and she rather fixated on it. One colour seemed to flow into the next, and there didn't seem to be a pattern – just a continuum of lovely, lovely light. It reminded her of a multi-coloured novelty night-light she'd bought at the gift shop at the foot of Space Mountain at EuroDisney. She found that she liked watching it – just watching it, and wondering, if the Doctor was thinking of her, how and what was he thinking? And was he watching his pin glow right now as well?

The trick was keeping it hidden. She found herself wearing a lot more high-collar jackets and sweaters, and a lot more black, than she normally would, just to keep the pin inside on her tee-shirt or tank top, so that her current, clueless Doctor would not see. It was like being a teen-ager and dressing to hide a hickey from her parents. A clandestine meeting had occurred, a connection was made, she was excited and apprehensive all at once, and knew that the world would end if they ever found out.

Although, in the case of the current Doctor seeing the pin, that might literally be true. Actually, she had no idea what would happen if the current Doctor found out. She resolved that it was best never to test it.

Though, after the initial shock and (if she was honest with herself) excitement of the future Doctor's gift had worn off, though she still kept it close to her, she realised it did not make her feel better. She loved the gift, she loved the Doctor, but he had said that his visit would bring closure somehow, and he had supposedly known it because _she_ had told him so in the future, but… she felt no sort of closure. In fact, the connection with a Doctor who loved her made her ardour all the more real, all the more hot and unbearable.

So was time now splintered, or bent, or the future changed for the worse? She didn't know how these things worked. Had she let him down, and herself, by resisting his attempts to talk to her about his feelings, and the impossibility of their union? If she had sat there in that garden with him until it was hashed out, would she feel herself beginning to come to terms with it, and letting go slowly of her love for him? Today, fourteen days after the future Doctor's visit, she wondered this, and scolded herself. She wished now that she had let him engage her. Maybe it was true that "working through it" with words was the best thing for them…

"Martha?" he called to her, knocking on her bedroom door. "Are you ready to go?"

"Yep," she answered, tucking the pin back behind her collar. "Give me a sec." She grabbed a black leather jacket from her wardrobe and climbed into it, zipping it all the way up to her chin. She took a quick peek in the mirror, as she was afraid of looking stuffy. She needn't have worried – she was cleanly chic. Not that _anyone_ in her life would notice right now.

She opened the door and stepped out, joining him in the corridor. He had a serious look on his face.

"What's wrong?" she asked.

He grabbed her had and began tugging her down the hall. "The Vertrappine Pod People have run amok."

She waited for him to say more, but he didn't. "Do you expect me to know what that means?"

"They are a peace-loving herbivorous society," he told her. "But they've been infected with a carnivorous bug."

"_With_ a carnivorous bug, or _by _a carnivorous bug?"

"Both, actually," he reported. "The Roggiapine Insect Tribe invaded their planet six days ago, and infected them with a virus that turns herbivores into carnivores."

"Ah. Actual _bugs _with a bug. So now… what, they're trying to eat each other?"

"No, they're trying to eat the Tuttapine Beings with whom they share the planet, until now, peacefully. If we don't get in there soon, it's going to cause an interplanetary incident, and the Merciapine Troupe will have to get involved and arrest everyone, and no-one wants that."

They arrived in the console room, and he let go of her hand.

"So what do we do?" she asked.

"What we always do," he told her, flipping switches and darting round the controls. "Fly into the fray, try to stop them, and hope they don't eat us."

"Fabulous," she sighed.

* * *

In the inner sanctum of the Tuttapine, the Doctor studied readings that their scientific society had taken from the rogue Vertrappines who had been stalking them in the main bunker and drooling all over their soil. His brow was furrowed and he was deadly earnest, the wheels in his great brain turning at ten thousand miles per minute.

As she often did in these moments, Martha just stared. She gazed shamelessly and thought for the millionth time of why she loved him, and why, oh why, he could get under her skin.

The furrow – intense, avid, handsome. The lips – soft, malleable. The eyes and brainy specs – practically all-seeing and all-knowing, deep brown, sharp. The hair – carefully mussed, luxurious and chic. The suit – oh, so well-fitted. The body – a powder keg of suppressed emotion and energy…

And the brain. The spark. That tremendous, bountiful, beautiful, dark, dark brain of his. So much happiness and torment he had seen, so much love and hate and everything in-between…

That was the part she loved most. It was the most pitiable, the most impressive and the sexiest bit of him. All the other stuff – the handsome exterior – she reckoned, had simply been put into place by the gods to make _her_ as miserable as possible.

The Doctor had now switched from simple data to an infrared screen that showed the current goings-on of the Vertrappine. They were scuttling about outside, looking for fresh meat, insane with hunger and growing more violent by the moment.

"Martha, look at this," he said to her, tearing her attention away from, she hoped, _not_ checking him out _too _closely or inappropriately. She craned her neck to see what he was pointing at. "Do you see that heat signature radiating from the Vertrappines?" he asked.

"That reddish aura?"

"Yes," he answered. "That's not supposed to be there. If it were a true pure heat signature it would have disspated by now, since these little monsters have been outside trying to feed for nigh on twenty-four hours. No, no, it's not a heat signature. It's a transmission reception signal, disguised to look like a heat signature." He stared at her meaningfully with his tongue shoved against the back of his upper set of teeth and his eyes behind glasses, wide, waiting for her to realise the significance.

She got momentarily distracted by the tongue thing, and then attempted to focus on the implications of what he was saying. She tried, but, "Sorry, Doctor, I don't understand what you're trying to tell me."

"They don't have a virus like we thought," he said, excitedly. "They're being controlled by a signal, some kind of transmission coming from the Roggiapine insects. Which is good news. It means that the Roggiapines are still on the planet somewhere, and that all we have to do is talk them into cutting the transmission! We don't actually have to find a biologically-based cure for a really bloody scary infection, and find a way to administer it without turning into flesh-eating zombies ourselves!"

"Oh," she said, raising her eyebrows. "That is good news."

"Diplomacy is all it takes," he said with a smile. She adored that smile. "And diplomacy is my strong suit. Of course, when I say diplomacy, in this case, I mean some cloak-and-dagger rubbish coupled with some bait-and-switch and a bit of flim-flam."

"I see. You were _this close_ to diplomatic."

"Well, the Roggiapine aren't the brightest bulbs on the tree. I'm not sure they can be reasoned with, and the Vertrappine don't have time for me to get all… wordy."

* * *

But the Doctor couldn't help himself. He was, at heart, a man of many words. He had tried first to contact the Roggiapine Insects and talk them down. However, all he had succeeded in doing was to alert them to his presence, and piss them off royally.

The Doctor had been told that there was an extention to the base on the other side of the field, a small bunker built for communications only. But as a safety precaution, it had not been connected to the main bunker by underground tunnels, so if anyone wanted to access it, they had go over-ground. Inside, there was radio equipment enough that the Doctor felt he had a shot at interfering with the transmission, breaking the Roggiapine's hold on the Vertrappine, thus facilitating an all-out war in which the Roggiapine would be grossly outmatched and would have no choice but to flee. The Doctor promised to stay and help train a new militia squad if need be, after the Insects had been dispatched.

And so, when he and Martha put Plan B into action, it was running, hand-in-hand, across a minefield of ravenous Vertrappine (who were, fortunately, quite slow-moving), and laser blasts from the Roggiapine ship, which, as it turned out, was parked just above a very nearby mountain, and had been thus far cloaked from being detected by radar.

The Doctor detected the opening to the communications bunker beneath a bed of incongruous pink tulips by using the sonic screwdriver, and then used it again to get them both inside. Upon entering, one single light came on, and the Doctor and Martha looked about.

The room was no larger than the average toilet cubicle in the basement of a night club. Clearly, it had been built for one.

"Mm," he mused. "Isn't this cosy?"

* * *

It took the Doctor approximately thirty minutes to dismantle and re-wire the radio and amplifier equipment. He did so with Martha's help; _hold this, finger here, pliers please. _He explained as he went that the frequency being broadcast by the Roggiapine was not of the same type as this particular radio, which was why it had to be "fixed" by his skilled Time Lord hands, and then tweaked using the sonic.

At last, he very earnestly set the sonic screwdriver to a particular setting, and then leaned it against a makeshift mini-easel, aimed at a junction of cables inside the radio.

"It'll take about twenty minutes to ramp up properly, and then we can deploy."

"Okay," she sighed.

It must have been a million degrees in that tight little room. She desperately wanted to peel off her black leather jacket, but in close quarters like this, she felt sure that she would not be able to conceal the future Doctor's pin. So beneath her clothes, she endured the sweat and could feel it running down her back. She blotted it from her forehead rather unsuccessfully with her hand, and noticed with some adolescent ardor that the Doctor's brow was well beaded as hers.

The Doctor stood up straight suddenly and turned toward her. He was so close, she could feel his breath on her face. "Martha, there's something you should know."

"Yes?"

"This radio thing we're doing, blocking the transmission, it might work," he said. "But it will almost certainly bring attention to where we are. Right now, we are invisible to their radar devices, but the signal we're about to send will be a beacon, inviting them to come get us."

"Oh," she responded. "That's… erm, not good."

"There's a pretty good chance, they'll aim for this bunker and blow it out of the ground once the radio signal has been sent. And since there's no way to detonate this thing remotely…"

"They'll blow us out of the ground as well."

"Yeah. I didn't realise how high up I'd have to ramp this thing, until we got here. If I'd known, I would have had you stay…"

"Stop right there. Don't finish that sentence. You know that even if you had foreseen this, I wouldn't have listened. I wouldn't have stayed behind for anything. You know that I believe my place is at your side, for better or worse."

He paused, and seemed to search her eyes. She felt him reaching deeply into her soul just then, looking for the right thing to say or do in this most intense of moments.

"Martha, you know I care about you," he said softly, suddenly taking her hand. Her breath hitched, and her vision blurred for a few seconds. So close, so close…

"Yes," she whispered. "I care about you, too."

"And I love being with you – the running and the adrenaline. You're quite a woman, Martha."

"Thank you," she managed.

"You are absolutely brilliant," he said with a smile. "You are going to be a fantastic doctor. Your patients… oh, they're so lucky to have you."

"Thank you, Doctor," she said.

"And I have been a lucky man to have you in my life."

Later when she looked back at these few moments, she would kick herself for not seeing where this was all going.

"You know that I need you, right?" he asked. "That I have always needed you?"

"I do now," she replied, nearly crying.

"Well, I do," he added. And then he bent and slowly wrapped his arms round her. "You are brave, and brilliant and _beautiful_, Martha. So beautiful…"

And there they were, locked in an embrace. A tiny spot on the plains of a foreign planet, in a tight bunker, with the Doctor gushing, and Martha's entire being completely on fire. She was holding back with everything she had, trying not to express the pure ecstasy she felt, the pure desire that was coursing through her. Every molecule in her body hummed with his words, his breath, the heat and his touch.

"This sounds like a goodbye," she mused absently as he held her.

"Well," he said, his voice deep and breathy. "I wanted to make these last moments count. For you, and for me."

"Doctor…"

She had come to terms, long since, with the fact that she might indeed die in a fiery blaze of something or other as long as she travelled with the Doctor, but had decided that it was worth it, just to be near him.

And if he wanted to be near…

"So let's use these last few moments, Martha, the last few minutes of high adrenaline…"

She rode out the pause, and could feel her breath quickening.

"…and run. I will open the ground cover, and you run back to the main bunker. I'll use the sonic as best I can to draw fire from you, and maybe the carnivores will follow the pretty blue light."

"What?" she spat. "All that… all of that was leading up to… getting rid of me?"

"Saving your life."

"Not letting me be by your side when you take down these bastards? Shoving me aside? What was all that rubbish about being brilliant and beautiful?"

"I meant every word. I couldn't separate from you without having you know how I feel about you."

"That I'm plucky, and have a cute arse?"

"Martha!"

"And while we're on the subject, how were you expecting me to get home if you died here?"

"The TARDIS has a protocol for just such an occasion. I know it works, I used it once with…"

"Yeah, with Rose, I know. Daleks, Delta ray, game shows, god-like powers. You've told me the whole story at least five times."

"Martha, I'm not having you blown up. Not like this, not when I could stop it."

"Well, I'm not leaving your side. If you're getting blown up, then I'm getting blown up with you."

"Martha, stop."

"No, you stop. Either figure out a way to have us both live, or hold my hand as I die with you. And no more bloody speeches – I can't take anymore of that."


	9. Early Summer, 2008 4

**Okay, I know, it's really short, but I'm not doing it just to torture you, I promise. I figured I'd post it now, just after a good, juicy chapter, so you wouldn't feel totally cheated. And for what it's worth, I'm hoping to have the next chapter finished in the next day or so as well, but don't quote me on that...**

* * *

**Early Summer, 2008**

The Doctor lay on his bed, fully clothed, on top of the covers, turning the pin over and over in his hands. He loved to watch the spectrum of colours as the thing glowed. It made him smile to see one colour bleed into the next, as blue turned to green, then a lively yellow-orange, or as it hung in shades of grey for a bit, then took hold of a vibrant coral.

But tonight, it seemed to be stuck. He had noticed a few hours ago when it had begun at a pale yellow – no surprise there – and slid into sharp yellow, then steadily from there into orange into a fire-engine red. The red had lasted a few minutes, and he had been riveted to it – what would happen to the red? Then, quite suddenly, there had been a flash of intense white, only for a few seconds, and that had worked backward into the red, and settled into a nice hot pink. And that's where it was stuck, now, into hour four.

He sighed when he saw it, and realised it wasn't going to change.

And he resisted the urge to respond to it.

For a while.


	10. Late Spring, 2007 4

**Last night I totally rewrote the outline of this story, and after doing that, and then going back and reading what I've already written and posted... well, it might feel like I've put the head of a hippo on a giraffe. Meaning, I had a whole big plan, using the rosebush metaphor and the TARDIS' garden, Martha's dream about _almost _getting to shag the Doctor in a meadow, and the pink sweater she was wearing in the dream. But the story took a whole new direction at some point, at least in my brain, and I'm not sure how or when that happened. It might have been when I introduced the pins that glow when the wearers think of each other...**

**Anyway, if it feels like there's a lot of stuff introduced in the beginning that seems to go nowhere, here's my disclaimer: you're right - there is. I know that in a good story, most people don't much care, especially with the turn THIS chapter is about to take! But I felt the need to explain myself anyhow.**

**So, I hope that when you reach the end of this chapter, you are breathless and trembling, rather than thinking about the structure of this story. ;-)**

* * *

**Late Spring, 2007**

The Doctor had, of course, found a way to get out of that tiny bunker without getting them both blown to bits, and also managing to interfere with the Roggiapine signal and saving the Vertrappines from their own carnivorous insanity. He was great and clever and magical and…

"Eugh," Martha groaned, lying in her bed, staring at the ceiling. "Couldn't you, just _once…_" she said to no-one, bitterly, before heaving herself out of bed. As she paced, she thought of the ways in which she might finish that sentence. _Couldn't you just once not be so charming and clever and brave? _She knew that was barmy because if he weren't clever and brave, they'd both be dead about a hundred times over. _Could you just once not act the martyr?_

_Couldn't you just once give in?_

And this thought stopped her in her tracks. Her feet were still for a few moments, and then as quickly as this wondrous frustration had come on, another feeling crowded in along with it: self-loathing. _Oh, Doctor, you're so sexy. Oh, Doctor I love you so much! Oh, Doctor, dare I hope to wonder if you…_

"Eugh!" she repeated as she threw open her closet door and found her flip-flops. She was feeling all kinds of restless and angry, ever since the Doctor, in his infinite ignorance, had wound her up and dashed her hopes. What had she been hoping for? A confession that he felt something other than _companionly _feelings? Perhaps that he'd tear off her clothes and ravage her deliciously in their last few moments of life?

Well, yeah. So… restless. And pissed off.

It was time for a walk.

Normally, if she was going to do this, she'd at least throw on a robe or some sweats. Tonight she didn't have the presence of mind. She only managed the flip-flops because the thought of the icy marble floors against her feet made her shiver. She stepped out into the hall in a t-shirt that came to her knees and hung off her shoulder a bit, and began her rhythmic insomina walk.

And before she really knew it, she was stopped, standing infront of a door with her initials carved into the wood, just below the doorknob, and she could hear the TARDIS gears churning inside. She gave an exasperated exhalation and threw open the door.

"You've got a lot of bloody nerve, you!" she shouted at the man in the suit, currently standing inside the doughnut-shaped control panel, controlling something.

"Yeah, I thought you might be on the warpath tonight," he said, finishing up his typing. And then he stopped and looked up. "What happened?"

"It's what _didn't _happen, you utter… eugh! It's what's always wrong with us, Doctor, the things that never happen!"

"Okay. I hear you. Which time was it?" He reckoned he'd better get serious and get specific or he'd find himself in the line of fire, saying something completely clueless and insensitive.

She took her voice down a notch and took a deep breath. "First of all, you are… you know… the _other_ Doctor, yeah?"

He pushed his fingers inside his shirt collar and extracted his half of the heart he'd given her, to show that he was the Doctor 2.0, as he had put it, the one who was trying to get over Martha 1.0.

"Okay, good. 'Cause I've got a riot act to read you!" she told him with her teeth clenched. "It was the Vertrappines and the Roggiapines… carnivorous radio signal or something." With that, she started to pace.

He looked at the ceiling for a few moments and said, "Oh, right, that tight little bunker."

"Yeah, the tight little bunker." She stopped pacing and stood still, staring at him with her hands on her hips.

"That got you right worked-up, didn't it?" he asked. His eyes drifted to the ceiling once more. "Yeah, I remember. I thought we were going to get blown out of the ground…"

"So you tried to get rid of me. But first, you said all these nice things! And you started talking about making our last few moments count, and using the pent-up adrenaline… eugh!"

"Eugh?" he asked. "Again?"

"Yeah, that's my word of the night," she said, pacing again. "I'm too angry with you to express myself properly."

"Look, Martha," he said, coming round to her side. "I meant all that stuff I said. I did, I swear. Even then. I wasn't in love with you, but I _was_ so glad that I'd met you, and I knew then that you were brilliant and…"

A pause. "And beautiful?"

"Yeah. I suppose maybe I should have kept that part to myself," he muttered.

Meekly, she replied, "It would have made things a lot less confusing." Then she picked up her voice again and started hurling it once more at the Doctor. "And it was exciting, Doctor, you know?"

"I know."

"No, I mean, not just exciting, but like… _exciting,"_ she said, heaving that last word out of her mouth like it was too heavy to keep inside.

"Yeah, I know, Martha."

She clicked her tongue at him in disgust and continued to pace. "And you know, I thought, in that little bunker, I thought maybe _just this once_, you'd open your eyes. _Just this once_, because we were about to die, you'd be like a regular guy and see some spark in my eyes or something."

The Doctor remained silent, because in retrospect, he couldn't be entirely certain that he _hadn't_ seen some spark in her eyes. It was at a time in his life when he was choosing to ignore Martha's little signals, and her pain. Not to _cause_ her pain, but to spare his own. He kept having to remind himself that the loss he had suffered before meeting Martha had still been very raw and real… but it was no excuse for the silly games he played with her.

"But no!" she shouted. "No way! Not _just this once_, not ever! Not even in what we thought might be the last few moments of our lives!"

"I'm sorry, Martha."

"Do you even _have_ those desires, Doctor? Do you have working parts like a… guy, like a human guy?"

He chuckled. "Yeah. Yeah, I do. More than you might…"

"That's just great," she interrupted. "So you just denied _me_. Or didn't fancy _me_."

"Martha, to be fair, if I went for the shag every time I thought it could be the last few moments of my life... I'd be… well, a different sort of bloke, for starters. But I'd also be very…"

"What? Happy? Loose? Well-rested?"

He chuckled again. "Touché. But probably also dead."

"But you know what's the worst thing, Doctor? The most infuriating thing about this whole ugly business?"

"Tell me," he said earnestly, crossing his arms over his chest.

"It's not the rejection – not by itself. It's not the love that I feel, that's like a knife through my heart. It's not feeling like a third wheel all the time, even when there's only two of us aboard this ship."

"What is it?"

"It's that you always, _always_ have the upper hand! You _always _win those little battles! You _never_ give in to me, never let me win, never give me any power in this! You make all the decisions as to how our relationship is, and will be. You _know_ there is so much you could do to make me feel better, even without romance or physical contact or whatever – there are so many little things, and yet you always choose to hold it over my head instead."

He shifted uncomfortably. "Yikes," he said flatly.

"You always know how to get me all bloody hot and bothered, and then bring me back down to Earth with a giant _thud_. And you take so much damn glee in everything you do, and you seem so innocent, but there you are, dancing round the console, all the time knowing that you could bring me to my knees at any moment you chose! And there's not a thing I can do about it!"

The Doctor's eyebrows were up, and he was watching her with pounding hearts. He exhaled through pursed lips, thinking of how to respond.

He took a deep breath and took a step toward her. "Martha, I never did any of that on purpose. I mean, yeah, I may have consciously chosen to ignore you from time to time. Though, you should know, that I didn't choose to ignore _everything_ you threw at me – there were plenty of times when I honestly, _honestly_ didn't see it. Most of the time, I'd say, I didn't see it."

"What?" she asked, disbelieving.

"But to say that I always had the upper hand…" he began, and then paused to collect his thoughts. "I never did any of that to gain the upper hand. I don't look upon my companions as adversaries. There would have been no concept of _the upper hand_ in my mind, where you were concerned."

"And maybe that's the problem," she said to him. "Maybe the fact that you never saw me as an adversary is the problem."

"No, I refuse to believe that. You were my friend. You _are_ my friend. My ally always, never an adversary."

"But I am fighting so hard!" she insisted, her voice high and desperate. "I feel like I am always at war with you on the inside, and you keep on winning! You just keep tearing me down."

"Martha, I'm sorry to have to say this, but that's just the nature of… unrequited love, I suppose. It's the nature of the beast, any time we don't get what we want, we feel like the other person or entity has the upper hand. And it's just not the case. Sure, I can see how perception gets warped that way when it keeps happening over and over again, and for that I'm sorry, I truly am. But Martha, sometimes there is no upper hand – sometimes it's just a crap situation, and there's nothing to be done, until fate chooses to intervene. Like with us, now."

"Oh, thanks, that's nice and condescending."

"It's the truth."

"Well, that's lovely," she hissed. "There you go again. Being the bigger person – or whatever you are. Being the guy with all the answers, and I'm just a child with _so much to learn!_"

"Look, you're angry just now, I get that, but you're not listening to reason. I wish there were something I could say to you, to make you see…"

There was a long silence while she sulked, and he watched her.

"Scratch that. I wish there were something I could do to take away your pain _right now_. But this is a long process – and we'll get there, I promise." He was sincere and calm, and her pain in this moment genuinely hurt him. He did regret his time with her in very many ways, but they were here so that they could hash it out and continue on the road to getting-over-it. He was at a loss now because she was almost acting like she expected him to erase the past. Which he _could_ do, but…

But his calmness infuriated her. "Oh, you complete…" she gritted her teeth to avoid calling him some horrible name she couldn't take back. "You wish there was something you could do to take the edge off _right now?_"

"Of course."

"Then let me have the upper hand," she said defiantly.

He was currently wearing the pin against his wrist, like a reverse cufflink. He moved his arm so he could glance at it, and saw that the intense pink had not changed. He shifted his gaze to her eyes, and he saw the same thing there.

What's more, he spied her own pin resting against her sternum on the inside of her oversized tee-shirt. It was glowing the same colour pink.

"Uh-oh," he muttered. "Er, Martha, this is not why we're here."

"I don't care," she said She grabbed him by the lapels and turned him toward the doughnut-shaped control board. She hopped up on it and never let go of him. "Come on, Doctor, let's go. Stop being the better man. Stop being _that guy_. You love me, you want to make me feel better? This is the only thing that will do it. Give in, _right now_."

She grasped those lapels harder and pulled. His lips smashed against hers with a force that actually hurt her teeth. And for a wonderful, terrible few moments, they got lost. Their tongues pressed into each other and danced, their lips searched hungrily, as if to pull the other one in closer. He snaked his arms around her and allowed himself to caress her backside, and she pressed her knees inward, squeezing his hips. They both moaned with the upheaval it caused within their bodies. Without looking, the Doctor knew, the pink pins were changing as they moved…

Suddenly he stopped. He grabbed her by the shoulders and looked into her eyes desperately. "Martha, this is stupid. Are you sure it's what you want?"

She, in turn, grabbed him by the jawbones with both hands, and pulled his forehead against hers. "Yes. I'm sure. I want you like I always do. I mean, _I want you_. But I am so angry with you, I can't see straight. And I know, it's not _you_, you, it's you from the past that I'm angry with. But it _is_ you, because it's in your past, and it's stuff you did, so you are not innocent! Now give me closure."

"I know, but…" he was losing his resolve, feeling his body giving in. He wrapped his hands round her waist, and kissed her. Then kissed her again. Breathlessly, he tried in vain to reason, "Martha, the last time we talked, you said that the key to closure for you is learning why I couldn't love you back then."

"Sod it," she said, kissing back. "Things have changed, haven't they? Maybe you can try to answer the question again after you've fucked me blind, all right? Right now, I'm not listening anyway."


	11. Late Spring, 2007 5

Her language, her anger and urgency, her legs wrapped around his waist, they all guaranteed that he was iron-hot, hard, and could no longer reason with himself nor anyone else.

He moved his mouth down to the tender part of her neck, and she leaned back and moaned. He responded with a similar, visceral sound. With that, he grabbed the hem of her t-shirt and pulled it up over her head, to find her deliciously bare underneath, except for a pair of white cotton knickers. He tossed it over her shoulder onto the other side of the doughnut-shaped control board.

Then he took half a step back and began unbuttoning his jacket, eyes locked on her.

"No," she said, grabbing his hands. "Now."

He raised his eyebrows. "Like, _right _now?"

"Yes," she replied, pulling him back in with her ankles against his bum. "You're wearing a suit. It takes too long." She grabbed his tie and tugged him back down for a kiss.

"Let me at least lose the jacket," he breathed, as she went for his waistband and popped the button loose.

"If you must," she replied, concentrating now on the zip. "Just hurry."

He fumbled with the last two buttons, and practically ripped his pin-striped jacket down his arms and threw it on the floor. By the time he was finished doing that, Martha had her hand wrapped around his length, and was leaning back against the other hand. She was _ready_. Now, and now.

He looked her in the eyes first, to find her looking back with a pressing need, and still a little bit of anger. He could not bring himself to worm away from her again, even if it was to remove more clothes, so he pushed her knickers aside and buried himself inside her. She pushed forward against him, bringing him in deeper. She leaned against her hands behind her for leverage, and moaned again, from somewhere, it seemed within the depths of her soul. She closed her eyes momentarily, but not for long. If this was going to happen, she wanted to be in the moment – she wanted to watch.

_Maybe you can try to answer the question again after you've fucked me blind_, she had said. So he planted his hands on her hips and drove in, not very gently, with his sights set on giving her what she'd said she wanted. Both of them gritted their teeth against the impact, and Martha growled a few encouragements at him. Her eyes darted back and forth between his face, and the heated space between them. This spurred him on to aggressive, faster thrusts that truly made him wish she had allowed him to undress a bit more. Sweat was starting to gather, and run down his back as he pushed harder and harder at every moment.

Suddenly she sat up and wrapped her arms around his shoulders and clenched her thighs round his waist.

"You all right?" he asked, now bracing his hands against the control board, though he could not have stopped driving into her if a train had hit him.

She didn't say anything, but rather dug her fingernails into his shirt, at his left scapula, and he received his answer. She moaned hard, and he could feel her insides begin to bubble, as though she'd literally reached the boiling point. She whispered his name with a hiss, then added an expletive, and seemed to come forever. She grasped harder at him in her release – all parts of her seemed to pull tighter with each wave of ecstasy she felt. He stopped moving and relished the feeling of her pleasure surrounding him, her hot breath against his neck, a little bit of pain as she withdrew her fingernails from his back.

"Don't stop," she demanded, disengaging her arms and leaning back once again. She locked eyes with him, commanding him to continue.

He obeyed, by grasping her calves and pulling them up to his shoulders, one on either side of his head, forcing her to lie back even further. With that, he continued, harder and faster than before.

"Ah!" she cried out.

"All right?"

Gasping, she replied, "You're hurting me."

"Want me to stop?"

"God, no," she told him. "Don't you dare. Not until my vision goes blurry!"

With that, she heaved herself back up to a semi-sitting position, her hands braced against the control board behind her. She caught the Doctor's eye, and narrowed her own, challenging him to drive the wind out of her.

So he stopped for a moment, and narrowed his eyes in return, bit his lower lip and responded to the challenge. He drove in with force that frightened him a little – would she be able to…

And then there was a click, and a whoosh.

"Shit!" the Doctor spat.

"Oh, I know," she said, throwing her head back.

"No, no…" he said. "It's the… ugh, never mind!"

"What?" she wanted to know as he continued on his quest. He plunged forward hard, and she squeaked a little.

"Shhh," he told her. "Just… brace yourself."

He grabbed her hips again, and began moving not only himself, but also her. He pulled both of their bodies back and forth in tandem, impaling her over and over, much to her constant cries – sometimes words, sometimes just high-pitched exhalations. She again threw her head back and stared at the ceiling. Her eyes were glazed over now, and her rich magenta lips hung open in disbelief.

He found himself about to bite his tongue off, in his own passion. He disengaged it by saying, "Martha… I'm close, I can't hold back for much longer."

"All I see is fog…" she replied. He saw tears spill out the sides of her eyes.

"Good, because…" he said, and then lost control. He let out a hard, blunt groan as he spilled over inside her, and she responded with a few short screams. He couldn't tell if she was coming again, and at this moment, he couldn't really be bothered to care. He created big white handprints on her skin, he held on so tightly as he thrust again, then again, each time with more exhausted momentum, emptying everything he had within her.

After a quick pause, she sat up and draped her arms around him. This time, they just held each other, and as they worked their way down from the intoxication. Martha's vision slowly returned to normal and the Doctor's mind churned with turmoil.

Though not over what he had done with her, but over what they had done to their situation.

"What?" she asked, sensing his discomfort, pulling back and looking at him.

"Look," he told her, gesturing with his eyes to the area behind her.

She turned, trying not to let him slip from inside her, and gasped. Behind her, the other side of the doughnut control board had disappeared, as had the other entire half of the room. There was only a blank wall and the horseshoe-shaped board she was sitting on.

The TARDISes had been knocked offline from each other while its occupants had been using the control board in a capacity for which it had not been intended.

"Is that what you were cursing about?" she asked meekly.

"Yep."

She sighed. "You threw my t-shirt over there."

"Mm-hm," he said. "Sorry about that."

"I'll have to go back to my room in only my knickers and flip-flops."

"And that is just problem number one."


	12. Late Spring, 2007 6

The Doctor had pointed out, as they were preparing to make a break for it, from the interface room to Martha's bedroom, that he had no memory of ever seeing her naked before, sneaking about in the back reaches of the TARDIS, or otherwise. "Trust me, I would have remembered," he told her. They decided that they were safe from Doctor 1.0, who was lurking in his TARDIS someplace, or perhaps was asleep.

They shut the door to the Martha's bedroom softly, and the Doctor reclined on the bed, tossing his suit jacket, which he had picked up on the way out of the interface room, onto the floor. Martha padded into her closet, and emerged wearing a very short pair of purple nylon shorts, and a white t-shirt with a fun-run logo on it.

She stood at the foot of the bed with her hands on her hips. "So, you're stuck here."

"Yep."

"You are in the right TARDIS at the wrong time."

"Yep."

"Isn't that, like…"

"Punishable by centuries in prison, if I were to be tried by the Time Lords? Yep."

"You're going to have to hide from your other self."

"Yep."

"Jeez, Doctor. What happened?"

"Well, you happened to press your hand against the main online switch, which… well, there are other adjustments to make once the interface goes online, in order to connect the two TARDISes together, but without being online, there can be no connection at all. And while your hand was against it, I guess I… jostled you."

"Wow. Perhaps we should have gone to a broom closet or something."

"Or at the very least, used _my _side of the control panel. If we were in _my_ TARDIS, we'd be able to hook up again, but now this TARDIS has two Doctors, and the other one is unmanned. Much more complicated."

"So… after I switched us off-line, you just kept going?" she asked, smiling in disbelief, climbing up onto the bed with him and, for the moment, just sitting on her knees looking down at him.

"What was I supposed to do?"

"I don't know!"

"There was nothing I could do about it, once the damage had been done, and frankly, Martha, I couldn't have stopped what I was doing if my life depended on it."

"Hm, so now… I have to continue to live my normal-ish life with my regular Doctor," she said. "But I'll have _you_ hidden away in the TARDIS."

He smirked. "Looks like."

She smiled wider and looked to the side in mischievous contemplation. "Hm, thinking about that… it's kind of hot."

"Yeah? Risking a time paradox for sex gets you hot?"

"Having the infuriating Doctor 1.0 to run and jump with, and the much more _agreeable_ _you_ to squish and play with," she said. "_That _is hot." She chuckled and then lay down, resting her head on his upper arm, and her hand on his chest. She snuggled up to him and sighed. "So what do we do now?"

"Traditionally, this is the part where we sleep."

"No, I mean… in the long-term?"

"Don't worry about it – I'll work it out. You just concentrate on doing what you're supposed to do with _him_, and not letting him know that anything weird is going on."

"He won't have an inkling?"

"Nope," he told her. "You'll do a great job of acting like everything is normal. He'll have no idea. I mean, I had no idea."

"Okay, if you say so. On a different note, you and I now have more time to talk," she said, playing with his shirt buttons.

He felt that she was waiting for him to say something. There was a pause, and then, "Martha, I'm still not sure why I didn't love you back then. Or rather, now. When I was him." His voice was low, forlorn.

"It's okay, Doctor," she said back to him, equally softly. "I'm not sure I really need to know anymore."

"Really?"

"Yeah. Tonight, with the _feelings_ I was having, I realised something about myself. I used to think that the torment I felt when I was with you was about your not loving me and my not being able to work out why. Was I not pretty or clever or _whatever_ enough for you? And I was trying to figure out what I could change, or what I could do to make you want me."

"Mm."

"But tonight, like I told you, I think I realised for the first time that the torment comes from the feeling of powerlessness. It created something that was, paradoxically, powerful, in me. So that I wasn't just feeling love, but also a kind of inner violence."

"It's called passion," he muttered, almost without moving his lips.

"No, I've known simple passion and this is more than that. Worse than that, or better – I can't decide. It's… that anger I was feeling at you, and the heat, wanting you… it all made it come together. It's something I had never come to terms with before, really, and something that I had never encountered at all until I met you."

"What's that?"

"Just that: the combination of lust and anger. The feeling of wanting to fuck you and kill you all at the same time."

"Ah."

"And it's all twisted in with what I told you before about you having the upper hand. The knowledge that you could, if you want to, cure me of all of it, but chose not to. And that just makes it worse, it makes me want to fuck you and kill you even harder."

"Kill me harder?"

She lifted her head and stared at him. "_That _is the part of the equation you choose to focus on?"

He shrugged. She chuckled again.

"And you had never experienced that before?" he asked.

"No," she told him. "I know… it's like what people write about. The love/hate thing, two sides of the same coin. Desire and violence coming from the same place within. Great novels are born of this concept, I just… I guess it was always so abstract to me, it was something that only appeared in fiction, and I didn't recognise it in myself. And, Doctor, it grew in me insidiously – it didn't just pop up one day. Why, have you ever experienced that?"

"I suppose, in different incarnations…" he said, trailing off.

Martha wanted to know what the hell that meant, but decided not to push. They were trying to get _past_ their relationship issues, not open a whole big box of new ones, brought about by stories from the Doctor's romantic past. Besides, a man with nine hundred years' experience under his belt could probably blow her tiny human mind with the perverse proclivities it has had to work its way through.

So she asked a rather innocuous question, or so she thought.

"By the way, how did you manage to find such a _convenient_ time to come here, and hash out our little problem?" she wondered.

"Funny you should ask," he said, removing the pin from the inside of his wrist, currently not glowing. "It's this little darling – which I guess now has gone dark, since your pin was attached to your t-shirt when I tossed it into my TARDIS."

"Oh yeah. That's a shame!" she said sincerely, then returned to the conversation at-hand. "So, you saw that I was thinking about you."

"Well, yes, for a start. Sorry, Martha, but I didn't tell you the whole truth about what the pins do. I'm sure you noticed that they change colour as they glow."

"Yeah."

"Yeah, it changes with moods. Your moods register on my pin, as long as you are wearing it against your skin, and thinking of me. And vice versa."

Her face flattened. "Go on."

"Yellow is fear, green is joy. Blue is sadness."

"Yeah, yeah. What colour is randy and rejected?" she asked.

"In this case, hot pink. You see, red is… well…"

"Fire in the loins?" she asked, rolling her eyes.

"Okay, sure. And I saw red red red for a few minutes. I didn't know why, but now, I assume it was while you were in the bunker, listening to me tell you how wonderful you are, and how we should make our last moments count. But then, suddenly, it flashed intense white. That indicates anger."

"White is anger?"

"Mm-hm. Fairly soon, the two mixed and settled into hot pink. So randy and rejected isn't quite right. Randy and pissed off is more like it, and I thought it would be a good time to talk."

"When I'm all hot and bothered, you thought it would be a good time to… talk?"

"I didn't think it would be a good time to let you just languish with nothing to hold onto," he told her. "Wait, that came out wrong…"

"So you interfaced with this TARDIS _knowing_ I'd be in the mood for an angry shag?"

"Yes, but trust me, I was not expecting to _give_ you an angry shag. I seriously just wanted to offer you some comfort. I could see how on-edge you were, and… thought I could help."

"How, with a bucket of cold water and some Enya?"

"No! I just… oh, Martha."

She stared at him sceptically for a few minutes, and she contemplated. Finally she lay back down, still with his arm under her neck, and said, "Okay."

"Okay what?" he asked.

"Okay, I get it."

"Get what?"

"If I had known what the pin really does, and you had given me a two-way switch to the interface room or something, I would have done the same thing. I'd have waited until I could see red, then I'd have swooped in for the kill."

"Again with the killing."

"Oh, shut up. Just be glad I'm only angry with you now for not telling me the truth about the pin, not about using it to your own advantage."

"But I didn't…"

"Shh. Just go to sleep, and hope the Doctor 1.0 doesn't choose tomorrow to start coming in mornings to wake me."

"He never will."

"Figures."


	13. Late spring, 2007 7

One of the best things about travelling with her Doctor was the feeling of satisfaction she got, from a job well-done, a civilisation or a ship or an individual well-saved. It was similar to the feeling she sought through studying medicine and becoming a doctor.

A space station had come into peril from its own internal combustion system, and the countdown to destruction had begun fourteen days before certain disaster. On days one and two, Martha did research, while the Doctor 1.0 inspected the system itself, using the sonic screwdriver and three or four "experts" from the space station itself. On day three, the Doctor disengaged the fuel replication system, in order to reduce the danger of explosion. On day four, he came across one of the engine's "safeguards" that would blow up the whole station if it discovered the fuel depleting, and it went unchecked. He had to power down the damper on the fuel replication until he could find a way to distract the safeguards. On day five, he began the implementation of a plan to distract the safeguards, and on day eight, it was finally finished: a second, "dummy" internal combustion system, with its failsafe mechanisms tuned into, and hopefully overriding, the existing one. On day nine, he re-set the original system to stop replicating, and on day ten, the danger had been averted. This evening, the Doctor and Martha were given a special dinner banquet on-board the space station as thanks, and the TARDIS was retrieved from its special storage facility, where it floated in stasis within a vaccuum.

And so, she lay down on her bed after spending ten nights away, on the space station. She thought about the great work the Doctor had done, and how he had each day briefed her on the following day's work, giving her important things to do, letting her use her brain and make judgements of her own, and making her feel needed. Of course, at the end of it all, he had, once again, gushed over her wonderfulness, and then kissed her on the cheek and went to bed, leaving her to sigh, watching after him.

A knock came at her door as she lay there.

"Come in," she said.

The Doctor entered her room, and sat down on the bed. He showed her the pin, to let her know who he was.

"Long time no see," she said with a smile.

"Yeah. Two weeks?"

"Almost."

"Fuel replication problem?" he asked. "Space station?"

"Yes," she said, stretching out on the bed, with her hands behind her head. "So, what did you do for ten nights in the TARDIS all on your own?"

"Martha, I've spent years at a time in the TARDIS on my own before. This was hardly a blip."

"Yeah, but… you couldn't touch anything or go anywhere."

He shrugged. "That's true. I did steal some stuff from the fridge, though."

"For shame," she said, sitting up for a hug.

He kissed her just behind the ear as they embraced, and he said, "Actually, I've basically spent the last two weeks (or however long you were gone) in the interface room."

"Trying to work out how to re-connect with your TARDIS?"

"Among other things, yes."

"And? Any progress?"

"Well, sort of," he told her, breaking off the hug. "I basically worked out early on that I won't be able to get a lock on my own TARDIS until one of the two TARDISes is stable for a while."

"Why not?"

"Because I have no control over this TARDIS, so I'll have to make mine come to me. And I know basically where I left it, I mean, it'll be relatively near where we were that night, but it's still sort of floating in space. And when it went offline, it will have been propelled backwards a few thousand feet – it always happens with the temporal debris that goes _bang_ when someone hits that button. "

"Propulsion?"

"Yep. And by now, it's more than a few thousand feet because it'll have been affected by various gravitational factors. So, until one TARDIS or the other is stable, I can't pinpoint the other one well enough to bring it in. Before, I had the advantage of knowing where you and he would be, and being able to lock on remotely – it's complicated."

"Oh, I believe you."

"But now, because my TARDIS is unmanned, it would have to be an extremely precise fit, and… well." He sighed. "I'm going to need for us to be stable long enough to program the sonic to retrieve the _unstable_ TARDIS remotely, without interfering with this TARDIS, or _his_ sonic."

"Blimey. Why couldn't you do it while we were waiting for _him_ to save the space station?"

"Two reasons. One, this TARDIS was in a stasis vaccuum, which means it was sort of outside the realm of existence for a bit. Not stable in the least. Two, this TARDIS realised I was here, while you two were out."

"Ooh," she said, eyebrows raised. "So… what, then?"

"I spent part of the time communing with her, trying to to calm her, since she felt a sort of _grating_ on her senses, and it made her very, very nervous to have me here."

"Because you're out of your own time stream?"

"Precisely. And if I hadn't been able to calm her, then the turmoil would have resonated in the mind of Doctor 1.0 when you and he returned, and then he'd know I'm here. And that cannot happen!"

"So she understands? She won't tell?"

"She understands," he said to her, looking her over.

Martha felt his eyes on her, roving. "What?" she asked, self-consciously.

"Martha, let me ask you something," he asked, standing up. Now he himself was pacing, though quite slowly, not the usual caged cat, agitated gait. "How do you feel now? About me, about… all that love and torment you were talking about when I last saw you? The conflict of lust and anger?"

"Better," she answered.

"Yeah? Because didn't you and I sleep in the same room when we were on that space station?"

"Yes, we did. But at least, mercifully, we had our own beds."

"How did that all go for you?"

"All right," she said. "I love him – you – but I was able to just _be_ there with you without feeling the violence inside."

"You feel the love, and not the violence?"

"Yes."

"You are starting to heal, then."

"Yes, I think so, Doctor," she said, standing up and crossing to him. She pressed her hand against his breast pocket. "And you are a big part of that. What you did for me…"

"Oh, believe me, that wasn't just for you."

"Well, I know that. I just mean, you gave me exactly what I needed."

"Good."

"And I don't just mean…" she blushed a little.

"What?"

"I don't just mean that you, for lack of a better phrase, banged it out of me. You also gave me the satisfaction of knowing that somewhere in the universe, even if my Doctor 1.0 is infuriating, there is a Doctor who loves me and knows how to show it. Doctor 2.0 is still in the future, and I get to be powerful."

"Good, Martha. I'm so glad."

"I can see how we hit the road to healing."

"Good," he said, with some finality, though not making eye-contact.

She curled her arms around his neck. "So, you and I can have a little fun while you work out how to get yourself out of here."

He smiled softly. "Sure we can."

"Don't work too fast."

"I'll try not to."

"But then, we have to let go, right? No more crossing over because it's too dangerous, right?"

"Oh, absolutely, yeah."

"So we'll make the most of it," she sang, and stood on tiptoe to kiss him. He kissed back, but she felt something wasn't quite right. She pulled away slowly. "What's the matter?"

He smiled unconvincingly. "I'm glad you're healing, Martha."

She took a half step back. "But you're not." She felt deflated, and internally kicked herself for not seeing this coming.

He didn't look her in the eye as he said, "I've just been feeling crazed. Almost two weeks, you know…"

"To knock about the TARDIS, stewing in your own juices?"

"Well," he mumbled. "Yeah."

"Damn it," she sighed. "I'm sorry. I should have realised."

"It's not your fault – there's nothing you could have done about that. This is the way it had to be. You had to stay on the space station, and I had to be locked up in here…"

"No, I know that. I'm sorry for not seeing sooner that… well, what we did was really tailored to _my_ needs – you saw to that."

"Yeah," he muttered.

"So, talk to me."

"Well, there's not much to say. I've spent the last two weeks in the TARDIS thinking about you. Missing you. Thinking about our _experience_ together. And…"

"And?"

"And, it's getting worse," he said, his voice straining. "I'm not on the road to getting over you. If anything, our actions made me feel even more at a loss, even more…" He exhaled with exasperation, and ran his hands through his hair before sitting down on the bed.

"Even more… what?" she asked.

"What?"

"You said that what we did made you feel even more… and then you trailed off."

"Yeah, well, some things are better said not with words."

"But, if you can put it into words, maybe we can get you on the road."

"How d'you figure?"

"Well, when I reached inside myself and realised the reason why I want to explode when I'm around you, and we talked it out, then had some_ physical interaction_ proved cathartic… now I feel a lot better. And our being together and risking paradoxes and what-have-you, it doesn't all seem so in vain now."

"I see. Okay, maybe you're right."

"I realized that you make me feel powerless sometimes, and also conflicted as to exactly what I'd like to do to you. Now complete this sentence: _When I look at Martha, she makes me feel…"_

"…cold."

"Excuse me? How is that exactly?"

He thought about it. If he didn't phrase it correctly, it would come out sounding like stream-of-consciousness word soup.

"I suppose when I think of this question, I think of myself and how I feel about Martha 2.0, because she's the one who was _there_ when I realized I loved her… you. And when I was with her in the park that day, that day when she told me that there was a way to get over all this, I looked at her and felt a chill."

"Okay," she said. "Go on."

The Doctor shuddered inside. She was trying to remain strong, but he could hear malaise in her voice, as though she were mentally bracing herself for being hurt by what he had to say next.

"And it's not because you're a cold person, Martha," he corrected. "Quite the contrary, in fact. I've known a lot of human beings, and you're probably the warmest, most open I've ever encountered. But… you know what? Never mind, I wish I hadn't said that."

"No, please," she encouraged, taking his hand. "Please keep talking. I think you were getting somewhere."

He had to stop and think again. After a few beats he said, "It's like, I've been wandering about in the tundra for hundreds of years. And you are this warm, wonderful cabin with a fire burning inside."

"Ah," she said, with a smile.

"A fire, and hot cocoa and blankets, with a sign on the door that says _Doctor, please come in_," he continued. "And I feel like I trudged past it in the snow twenty-eight thousand times without ever seeing it, never knowing I wanted it. And then one day, I finally noticed it was there, only by then, the sign was gone and someone else had moved in. And all I could do then was continue in the cold. And there is nothing colder than when you can see warmth, and can't have it."

"I understand."

"And I feel like a complete idiot because it's something I _could_ have had a long time ago, and I was too stupid to see it. Too self-obsessed. Too…"

"I understand," she repeated, softly.

"But Martha, you understand, don't you, that I'm not just talking about..." he trailed off.

"Sex?"

"Yeah."

"Yes, I understand," she assured him.

"I mean, that's a big part of it, but it's more than that. It's…"

"I know what it is, Doctor."

"You do?"

"Sure," she shrugged.

She very casually reached forward and unbuttoned the Doctor's suit coat. Then she moved behind him, and pulled it down his arms, and hung it on the hook, on the back of the door.

"You can use that hook for your shirt and tie and trousers, too," she said.

He grimaced with confusion and watched her. She walked smoothly over to her closet, kicked off her shoes and stepped inside for a moment, and when she emerged, she was wearing her short shorts and fun-run top again. She shut the closet door and then looked him up and down.

"Is that how you sleep?" she asked.

"No," he responded.

"Well, then," she said, as though it ended some kind of argument. She crossed to the bed and peeled back the covers. "Which side do you prefer?"

He was taken off-guard by the question. "Oh, er… I'm… I don't mind."

"Okay. I like the left, if that's okay."

"Fine," he said. "Shall I?" He gestured to his tie.

"Yes," she replied. "Unless you'd like me to do it."

"I can do it," he said quickly, pulling his tie loose, then hanging it up. Then he unbuttoned his shirt, climbed out of it, and hung it up as well. As he began on his trousers, Martha moved about the room and seemed to be shutting down for the night. She switched off the lamps, set an alarm and took a vitamin.

As he was hanging his trousers on the hook, she took his hand and tugged. "Come to bed."

He let himself be led, and she crawled across the bed and snuggled under the covers on "her" side, and he did the same on his. And in the dim, dim light, the next thing she did was insinuate herself between his body and his left arm. She laid on her side with her hand on his chest and one leg resting on his leg.

She heard him sigh heavily. It sounded like contentment to her.

"I love you," she whispered.

"I love you, too," he whispered back.

"Still cold?"

"I feel mostly very warm," he said, holding her close. "But there is still that little chill…"

She smiled wickedly into the dark.


	14. Late spring, 2007 8

She pushed herself up and brushed her lips against his jawbone, and sighed with a combination of contentment and desire. A frisson ran down his spine and pushed a slight sigh through his lips in response. He turned his head instinctively toward her, and their mouths met perfectly, like voices in a chorus.

His kiss was urgent and greedy, and he reached for her with his free arm. But before he could roll her way, she was moving further his way, now with her leg crawling over his side. She straddled his middle, broke the kiss and gazed down at him with a warm smile. Only love.

She leaned down and planted a kiss on his neck, just behind the ear.

"Tell me again," she whispered, before planting another kiss.

"I love you," he told her.

"Mm," she replied from somewhere in the depths of her being, and she ran her tongue up the outside of his ear. This ellicited an answering moan from him, and he ran his hands up her thighs, squeezing as another powerful frisson tore through him.

And she continued to plant kisses. Behind his ear, then lower, then a bit to the left… then another to the left. She dragged her tongue across his throat and felt his Adam's apple bob as he swallowed hard, and she worked her way up again to the opposite ear. She gently bit the lobe before wrapping her lips around it and pulling away with a wet _snap_.

She kissed and nipped her way across his collar bone, dipping her tongue into the indentations, teasing the senstive areas. Then down… she moved down his chest, covering, it seemed, every inch with some voracious contact from her mouth. She sighed a little as she went, followed her downward path with her fingers and massaged his skin softly, and occasionally she dragged her fingernails. She was relishing in his musical sighs, the whisperings of her name, the flexing and tensing of his body at key moments.

When her slow-burning kisses reached the waist band of his shorts, she teasingly grabbed it with her teeth and tugged lightly, letting it snap back into place. She heard and felt him chuckle slightly, and she looked up to find him looking back, smiling.

She allowed her tongue to lap softly at his navel, and he drew in a quick hiss through his teeth, as she laced her fingers into the waist band. She tugged, and and he shifted his body upwards to let her divest him of them. She sat up on her knees to help him bring them all the way to his toes, and then she discarded them on the floor with no ceremony.

He took the opportunity to sit up and peel her shirt over her head, and help her shimmy out of her own purple shorts.

But she didn't waste time. She pressed her hand to his shoulder to indicate he should lie back down, and he obeyed. She went back to work, where she had left off.

She placed kisses, luscious ones, across his stomach, where the waist band had once been. She nipped and licked the sensitive flesh once in a while, and he writhed beneath her, hardened and moaned. She descended even further, and now was deliberately slow, deliberately torturous in the way she moved. She nipped at his hip bone, ran her tongue in circles, and ran her hand almost absently up over his cock. His whole body twitched with the unexpected gesture, and she smiled a private smile.

She repeated the action on the other hip, using the other hand, and it ellicited the same response, with an added grunt from him, and a carefully-meted exhale. She spiraled her tongue for several seconds on his inner thigh, and she watched the blankets at his sides scrunch up between his fingers as he clutched them for leverage.

And quite suddenly, her tongue was quickly running up his cock, as her hand had. It was over almost so quickly that he wasn't sure what he had felt. Except then, she did it again. She licked it from bottom to top, and finished the second time with a little swirl round the head.

"Mm," she said to herself, before trying it a third time.

She followed this with another tour of his stomach, navel, hips, thighs and everything between. By the time she was finished nipping, kissing, licking and making him jerk and moan all for a second time, he could barely remember his own name, and was begging her inarticulately to do something unknowable.

She crawled up his body and returned to his mouth. She plunged her tongue inside with a voracity that let him know that the control she had been exhibiting had been merely a show. The Doctor began to sit up, and she allowed him to, but did not break contact. She could not. The kiss was _needed_.

And she found herself now in his lap. She placed one hand on his knee and leaned back, and with the other hand, guided his long-suffering member to just the right spot before sliding forward with a groan, and filling herself.

He breathed heavily now, as did she, and for a moment, they just sat, buzzing with excitement and lust, ready to push, ready to dive into one another. They gazed and loved and drank each other in. And in that moment, that most exquisite moment of closeness, the sort of moment the Doctor had been missing for longer than Martha could fathom, they both instictively understood that it was all so fleeting. They knew that not only could _this moment_ not last, but neither could the love that had brought it about – their love didn't even belong in the here and now! They were risking so much just to be together, and it meant they would have to pay the price, let go for good, after feeling… _this!_

But it didn't stop them. Martha squeezed her knees as tightly inward as they would go. She wrapped her arms around his neck and he wrapped his around her whole torso. She pressed her cheek to his, and whispered, "You know that I love you."

"I do," he breathed as she began to move. She pushed in, grinding against him, and he ground back. She moved slowly with deep moans, squeezing him from within, breathing in his ear, biting at the flesh of his neck. They were inside and wrapped around each other now, no limb disengaged from the others' body. They were now moving as one, and situated as though all the pleasure in the world lay in one column of light between them, which must be consumed and collapsed at this exact moment.

The fire was mounting steadily and sweat was gathering. Their brows showed signs of exhaustion, and their backs and shoulders became shiny as they pushed forward, forced inward by pleasure. And despite her judicious movements, within a just a few minutes, Martha found the burn too strong, threw her head back in climax. A dark pool of pleasure overtook her, and big, strong spasms grabbed at him from the inside as he watched her tremble and lose control. It was gorgeous to watch, and even more incredible to feel.

It didn't stop there. The Doctor held on to her hips this time, and encouraged her to continue, even in her spent state. She found the previous action too intense, and changed her pattern. She braced against his shoulders and moved up and down on him. To this, he reponded, "Oh y...," and closed his eyes momentarily against the sensation.

Short breaths came in and out of their mouths and they bored holes into each others' eyes and continued. Sweat pooled and rolled down their bodies, but the heat was worth it. Martha grabbed onto the Doctor's head impetuously, and forced a hungry kiss onto his mouth. She was close to climaxing again, and she broke away and kept her grip on his cheeks and neck. She whispered "Come in me," with an intensity, a spark in her eye that left no room for refusal.

The Doctor all but growled in response, and at long last, heaved them both sideways and found himself lying atop Martha Jones.

"Mm, say it again," he demanded, thrusting into her, without restraint.

"Come in me," she repeated, her eyes intense at the precipice of pleasure. "Do it now."

He gritted his teeth, and his whole body seemed to flatten, squeeze and explode all at the same time. He came with a sweet groan, just as she was reeling for a second time and climaxing around him. They never unlocked their eyes from one another, and experienced each others' pleasures along with their own. They were practically of one mind and one body, never letting go, having _one_ experience of pure ecstasy together.

And as they lay in the night, trying to catch their breath, the Doctor said, "I know what it is."

"What?" she sighed.

"The thing I was missing. The thing that made me feel cold. The thing I've been wanting from you. I have a word for it."

"Yeah?"

"Intimacy."

"Yeah," she agreed dreamily, before dropping off to sleep.


	15. Early Summer, 2007

**Okay, I know this is short, but I hope it is revelatory and compelling. :-)**

* * *

**Early Summer, 2007**

What exactly had driven this spectacular turn of events?

For Martha it was something like violence, an aggression that was yearning to escape, and an aggression that she craved from him. It was anger built up because of power she was denied.

For the Doctor, it was something like intimacy, a closeness with her that he'd felt happening within himself, a closeness that he craved from her. It was a vulnerability that had returned because of feelings he'd finally allowed himself to have.

So, for a month, they spent Martha's down-time indulging in a brand of furious intimacy that neither one of them had seen coming. The Doctor confined himself, more or less, to the interface room, knowing that his other self would never go there, and if and when he left there, he was extremely careful not to get caught sneaking to Martha's bedroom. They conducted their physical and cerebral relationship in two tiny corners of the universe, in total secret.

They both still had their moments of need; Martha would still occasionally go out into the world with her clueless travelling Doctor and become livid at some insensitive comment or action, and would return to the TARDIS in a boiling snit. The Doctor 2.0 would then give her the "upper hand" and oblige her angry whims.

Though, they were finding that the wrath of Martha was dwindling. Her boiling snits gradually were replaced by bemused rants. As time passed, she began to grow less and less frustrated with her "current" travelling Doctor. She began to see that the wonderful thing about a passion like that which she shared with Doctor 2.0 was that it was often _buried_ within, and could be awakened, like a volcano. She looked at the Doctor 1.0 sometimes and smiled knowingly, having seen what lay beneath the surface. She knew that somewhere not-too-difficult to access, there was a seriously passionate man who _loved_ her – he just wasn't ready to come out yet. She began to love even this aspect of him, the repressed, fearful aspect that lay in wait. For him, that explosion was still to come, and that made her immensely happy, even if _she_ would be "finished" soon with this little adventure, and would be perhaps getting past it and moving on to something new. With these thoughts, she could feel herself growing, a maturity and perspective beginning to blossom.

But not just yet. For the moment, she was quite happy to set the walls afire at night, with her stowaway Doctor.

The Doctor would find that after eighteen, twenty, twenty-four hours hiding out alone in a room full of buttons and wires, he craved contact. But, he came to recognise that this craving was not unlike one that he had felt at different periods in varying degrees, throughout most of his life, especially lately as Martha had become more and more important to him. And he would realise that this room full of wires was just a smaller version of the TARDIS in which he had locked himself alone for so long, and perhaps a metaphor for his own solitary state of mind. When she returned, Martha would feel his pain and give of herself as she always did, bring him into her world, her heart, her being, and he would feel whole again.

Though, the day when this version of the Doctor would have to say goodbye to this version of Martha approached quickly. The Doctor began to see events take shape, and how he would get his TARDIS back, and he began to prepare himself mentally for the day of separation. When he was alone, he began to realise, late in the game, that one of the wonderful things about intimacy was that its memories could endure. The ghost of someone's touch, the remnants of their lips upon one's lips, knowing that one has at least _experienced_ this amazing thing at least once… this sometimes sustains people for lifetimes. For someone like him, who would surely outlive everyone he would ever love, intimacy and its imprint on his life was a valuable thing, and he was so grateful to Martha for her place in his life, even if they would both be moving on soon.

So for now, he relished every moment with her, and made love to her like tomorrow might never come.

Her anger abated. His voracity for love and a connection settled into something comfortable. They had finally met halfway, and just _loved_ one another. They whiled away what time they could in each others' arms, as they waited for their bubble inevitably to burst.

* * *

"Hi," Martha said, walking into the interface room and closing the door behind her.

"Hello," he responded. He seemed to have been staring into a computer screen as she entered. He peered through his glasses at her and smiled. "I thought you'd gone to bed without saying good night."

"No," she sighed. "Just a long, long day."

"What's going on in your life? Where are you in the grand scheme of things?"

Martha knew that he asked these questions to find out where the TARDIS was, where perhaps it would be stationed in the near future, in order to find his own TARDIS again, and leave. The questions made her feel melancholy, and truth be told, she thought she sensed a bit of melancholy in his voice as well.

They both tried not to let it show.

"Oh, we were on Zabbek 4 today," she reported.

He peeked over his glasses. "Zabbek 4? The pulsing planet? Has organs and veins made up of universal energy?"

"Yep. That's why I'm so late. We were helping to re-power the temporal vascular ducts…"

"…and it took forever," he finished. "I remember."

She yawned and laid her head on his shoulder. "Yeah. Like nine hours. And that was once the Doctor – you, he, whatever – got the cable all hooked up to the hub in the Capitol building. Took all day just to work out how to fix the problem. A lot of bloody running around."

He gulped. This was it.

"Ah. Yeah, the temporal ducts were stripped by pirates, so I used some energy from the TARDIS to help jumpstart it. "

"I know. I was just there," she said wearily.

"Ah, memories."

"Ah, stuff that happened an hour ago."

There was a pause.

"Martha, we have to talk."


	16. Early Summer, 2007 2

She tensed. "Martha, we have to talk," had never been one of her favourite sentences.

"What about?" she asked, sitting up straight and giving him her attention with a very worried expression.

"I remember Zabbek 4 quite clearly," he said. "And I remember going to bed and crashing pretty hard, and then waking up in the middle of the night… something woke me. I don't know what – it seems like a crash or a…" he drifted off, his gaze resting on something in the corner for a few moments. "I couldn't get back to sleep for the next hour and a half, so I got up and took some readings on the TARDIS. Her heart was severely depleted from having given so much energy up to the planet's vascular system."

"Oh," Martha exclaimed in mild surprise. "Oh my. That can't be good."

"Well, no, it's not," he confirmed. "But much like a hangnail, which is also not good when untreated, it can be remedied. There's a place we can go to refuel, so to speak."

"Okay. Doctor what are you driving at?"

"Martha, tomorrow morning, this TARDIS will make a stop in Cardiff. From that point on… life changes for us."

"Changes how?"

"I can't tell you anything specific – wouldn't be sporting. Suffice it to say, there will be no more time for… _us. _You're going to hit the ground running when we land in Roald Dahl Plass, and…" he sighed. "I'm afraid, Martha, this is our last night together. From now on, it's you and him. And also… well, you'll find out tomorrow."

Her eyes filled with tears quite suddenly, so suddenly that it surprised even her. She opened her mouth to speak, but nothing came out. Just as well – she had no idea what to say or ask anyhow. She couldn't ask how he knew, or why they had to part. She knew the answers to those questions, or as much as she _could_ know.

"Okay," she breathed. "I hear you."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be," she said, trying again to catch her breath. "We both knew…"

"Yeah."

"So if he and I hit the ground running as you say, then what happens to you?"

"The TARDIS goes stationary for a period," he told her. "I can't tell you what happens to it, but some seriously weird stuff occurs, and the TARDIS doesn't move for a while. And during that time, I'll be able to locate my own floating TARDIS."

Silently, he was remembering that not only would the TARDIS be nice and still sitting on the Valiant for about a year, but the Master would soon be putting a paradox inhibitor on it. This would help, conveniently enough, reduce the risk of blowing up dimensions and causing his own personal paradox when he re-interfaced with his own TARDIS.

A single tear rolled down her cheek, and she wiped it away. She stood up and turned away, rather embarrassed, though she wasn't sure why. "Blimey, you'd think I hadn't known."

"No, it's okay," he said, standing up with her, pulling her against him. "It just means we'll see each other in a different time. Different circumstances. But from here on out, we'll always have… what we had. Have."

"Yeah – that's something," she conceded grudgingly, though it was of little consolation to her.

"And it also means that we have to make tonight count."

She sniffled, holding back a sob. Their _last night_ together.

* * *

They spent the night as usual: entwined and _feeling_ every moment, every touch. They both felt the pressure to make it memorable, and held nothing back. Every sensation was fully realised, and in a nerve-wracking turn of events, vocalised. Before, they had always tried to refrain from making noise, but tonight, though they still tried, they did not succeed. Their voices were used for proper, world-ending self-expression, and after a while, they gave up on trying to keep the headboard from hitting the wall.

The night was everything that they had both longed for, but every now and then, the realisation that it was _the last time_ crept upon them. Tears were shed in the heat of the moment, but that was okay. It was par-for-the-course in a relationship like theirs: out of its time, dangerous, intense and temporary.

In their final few moments as proper lovers, as their bodies were giving way to one another and somehow to the universe as well, Martha let out a high-pitched cry, just before crashing back to the ground.

All at once, a realisation occurred to the Doctor, even in his similarly careening-back-down state. He gritted his teeth and exclaimed with a harsh whisper, "Shit! I heard that!"

"You heard what?" she asked.

"Remember how I said something woke me up that night, after being on Zabbek 4?"

"Yeah."

Just then, there was a knock at her door. "Martha? Are you okay?" The Doctor's own groggy voice came through the all-too-thin, and _unlocked_wooden door.

"Oh my God!" she whispered. "What do I say?"

"I was half-asleep!" _her_ Doctor, the one whose body was still pressed into and around her, said, squinting his eyes. "I can't remember!"

"Er, I'm fine," she called out lamely. "Just having a dream. Go back to bed."

"Are you sure?"

The Doctor in the bed winced. He couldn't remember what was next – had he come in?

"Yes, I'm sure," Martha tried to assure him.

"Do you need anything?" he asked.

"No, I'm doing all right. Just let me get some rest, okay?"

"Yeah, sure…" the voice said, outside the door.

The two inside the room listened, but they didn't hear any footsteps moving away. That was not unusual – the TARDIS had heavy floors, and bare Time Lord feet in a groggy daze wouldn't necessarily report on them.

"Is he gone?" Martha whispered after about twenty seconds.

"I think so," he whispered back. Neither of them had moved; they had both frozen where they had stopped, for fear of toppling this very delicate balance.

"How will we know?"

He closed his eyes. "I think… in a few minutes we'll hear the TARDIS working. That will mean he's in the console room because he couldn't get back to sleep once he was up."

"It sounded like he was plenty knackered."

"Yeah, well… got back to my room and found I couldn't get comfy again. Haven't you ever had that happen?" he asked her.

"I suppose," she said, a little smile creeping across her face.

He rolled over on his back, and they stayed silent for a little while, holding hands and waiting. Finally, "There it is," he said.

"What?"

"The TARDIS, she's awake and thinking."

"She is?"

"Yeah, I guess you can't hear it, but I can. And she's not well," he said. "Wow, I'd forgotten how depleted she was."

Martha felt melancholy. "Tell me about it."

He turned over on his side to face her. "I know," he sighed. "This is not much fun, is it?"

"Not this very moment, no," she replied. "Though, five minutes ago…"

"Yes, well," he agreed, smiling. "All good things, Martha…"

"I know, but this…" she protested, sitting up in bed. "This, Doctor, this is a very, _very_ good thing!"

"I agree," he said. He swung his legs to the side of the bed and actually pulled his pants and trousers on. "But even very, _very_ good things have their time. Trust me, I am feeling it just like you are." He stood up and faced her.

She now very calmly moved to the side of the bed and began to pull her shorts and tee shirt back on. "So now what?"

"Now… we wait for your alarm to go off, and you'll get up and get dressed, go to the console room like always."

"No, I mean, _now what_ for us?"

"Well, Martha, I'm not going to lie to you," he said, moving round the bed. He sat down on her side, and took her hand, encouraging her to sit beside him. "In the morning, you'll land in Cardiff and it will start a chain of events that leads you into the hardest year of your life. You are about to be tested to the max."

"I am? How?"

"I can't tell you," he said. "You know that. What I _can_ tell you is that you won't have me to lean on during those times – you'll have to go it alone. "

She was frowning with worry. This all would be set into motion in a few hours, and she had no idea what to expect!

He continued. "And I can tell you, Martha, that even then, even when I was clueless Doctor, there was no one, and I mean _no one_ in the whole universe whom I would have trusted more, in accomplishing this task. Even _he_, that guy out there in the console room who has no idea what's about to happen, knows that when it comes to perseverance and sheer guts, no human will ever outdo you. And he will feel surprisingly calm when he turns you loose to… accomplish what you have to accomplish."

"Turns me loose?"

"Yes," he told her, patting her hand between his. "It has to be. He'll have… I had no choice. You will strike out into the world and you will survive. There will be days, weeks at a time, when you won't think that you will. But you will."

"Blimey," she whispered, tears flowing.

"And you won't just survive, Martha," he said. "You will blossom!"

"Blossom?"

"Yeah, I know it sounds stupid but… Martha, just like everything else that you do, your actions will be motivated, above all, by love. Not just for me, for your fellow man. You will grow tougher and smarter, and our relationship, this thing that you and I have, will come into perspective. You'll have a lot of time to think, and to look at the world and your life, and other peoples' lives…"

"…and I will move on."

"Yes."

"I'll be over you?" she asked, tears clinging to her chin, threatening to drop. "Whatever happens to me over the next year makes me get over you? That's… that's really harsh, Doctor. That's not okay with me!"

"No, no… from what I understand, when this little journey is over, no, you will not be over me. But you'll be a bigger, stronger person, you'll have your wits about you, and you'll see what you have to do."

"What I have to do?"

"You'll be in control, Martha. And yes, sooner than later, you'll get over me, and your actual _life_ can begin. And it will be okay with you, I promise. I've seen you when you're _okay_ , and it's a sight to behold."

She smiled, in spite of herself. Then she took a deep breath and said, "You're a frustrating man, you know that?"

"I know. But hopefully, I'm a little frustrating than that blunt instrument you've been travelling with."

"Only just," she said, ribbing him a little.

"Can you live with this? Some questions unanswered, some really hard stuff on the horizon?"

"Do I have a choice?" she asked.

"No, not really. I'm sorry I can't give you more to work with, Martha."

"I know, I know. Answering those questions for myself is crucial to who I will become,"she sighed. "I hate being mature."

"You'll be fine. You'll be wonderful."

"I sort of wish I didn't know."

"Didn't know what?"

"Any of it," she told him sadly. "That this is our last time, that there's an untold storm coming at me, that I'll be come this independent woman who doesn't need you anymore. None of that sounds particularly appealing."

"Sorry. I guess I should have been more careful with my words."

She glanced at the clock. Since time in the TARDIS is not kept exactly by Greenwich, her alarm was set by a number of hours, rather than a time. They still had three hours until the bell sounded. "I just wish I didn't have to stew about it for the next three hours."

"Well," he said. "Maybe there's something we can do to take your mind off it."


	17. After Summer

**Okay folks, this is the second-to-last chapter! **

**Don't feel too melancholy about how things have turned out, with Martha on the road to saving the world (and to recovery) and the Doctor with passion in his hearts, memories making him a better man. It's all good, I promise. :-)**

* * *

Martha met the Doctor 1.0 in the hallway just off the console room, about thirty seconds after saying goodbye to her stowaway. She pretended to be surprised when he told her they were going to make a stop in Cardiff. A few minutes later, they were on Malcassairo at the end of the universe, and she was meeting Captain Jack Harkness for the first time. Events being what they were, she didn't realise as she ran out of the TARDIS with her medical kit, trying in vain to save the life of her new friend, that it would be the last time she would walk through the door of a healthy TARDIS, for more than a year.

Briefly that afternoon, she and the Doctor and Jack sat with someone called Professor Yana and his assistant Chantho, and discussed their unique lots in life. She learned that the Doctor's hand could be severed and regrown if it happened at the proper time, just after a regeneration.

He offered her his regrown hand to shake, and she took it, and said with a smile, "All this time and you're still full of surprises." In response, he winked, and her heart skipped a beat. It was basically the last moment in which they had time to look at each other squarely, and have any kind of their old camaraderie. And in that moment, she knew: she would be okay. The passion and fulfillment she had known with him, it was forever imprinted on her soul, and for him, it was still in his future. And not for the first time, she realised that somewhere within this man standing before her, frustrating and clueless as he could be, there was someone who respected, admired, trusted, loved and wanted her. That man would give her the upper hand at last, he would give her power and satisfaction, and no one would ever be able to take that from her.

She trusted the Doctor 2.0 now, when he said that the next year would give her perspective. She realised that getting over her lovelorn issues was not the primary objective, but she now felt she could face it all with much more mettle.

She loved him with all of her heart, and she would use that power for good.

* * *

About two minutes after Martha left the bedroom, the stowaway could feel the TARDIS shaking. He knew it was reacting to the presence of Captain Jack Harkness, the "fixed point" in time and space who really shouldn't be alive at all, and fleeing to the end of the universe. A few hours later, from the interface room, he felt the whole vessel move as though it were being picked up. He knew it was being lifted onto a cargo truck by crane, and ultimately deposited into Professor Yana's lab. Eventually, he heard the voice of the newly-regenerated Master, taunting the panic-stricken Doctor outside. When the gears sounded and then stopped, he knew he was in London, sometime around Christmas of 2005.

And he knew that he and well and truly left behind the woman he had come to think of as Martha Jones 1.0. It made him immensely sad to think of, but that particular ship had sailed. Twice. Though, it did cross his mind that where he was, he _could_ go meet Martha Jones ahead of schedule, before their moon-landing adventure in the hospital, and truly screw things up, but that was just a _thought_, not an actual contemplation. It made him chuckle. He _could_ also go and watch the show on Christmas morning with the Sycorax ship hovering over the city, and he _could_ go and visit Rose, and mess with her head too…

But those are the things he would never do, just for laughs. Interfacing TARDISes had been for a definite cause.

It took about a week of solid scanning with an exhausted sonic screwdriver to find the floating TARDIS. Once he did, it took another three days to program the sonic to bring it in, and interface it with the TARDIS, currently held as secret prisoner upon the Valiant. The stowaway was out of there long before Harold Saxon came to power as Prime Minister, long before he loaded his wife into the vessel and cruelly showed her what the human race would become…

As he crossed from one side of the interface room to the other, he felt a pang hit him right in the gut. He was going back to his life, his timeline in which it was long over with Martha Jones, and she was on her way to marrying some other guy. He sighed, and pressed the button that put the interface room offline.

As he did, he had to move the tee-shirt that Martha had left, and he fingered the teardrop-shaped pin that was still attached. He thought of the moment in which she had pulled it over her head and tossed it aside. He felt a frisson of lust crawl up his spine then, and he smiled. He remembered the urgency in her voice as she demanded that he _show_ her that he loved her and wanted to make her feel better and more powerful. He thought the other numerous times when he read that desire in her eyes, and wanted nothing more than to ease her ache, and how liquid warm she felt when he sank into her.

As he wandered back into the console room to answer to the next adventure on his own, he smiled. He moved the gears into place, and knew that no one could take those memories from him. He had had the distinct privilege of being at the centre of the life of a wonderful woman _twice_, and he was a better man for it, no matter the pang of loss he might feel.


	18. Summer, 2009

**My friends, this is the final chapter. It has been an interesting experience writing this one... not easy. Lots of technobabble and emotional trauma... some of it relevant, much of it, as it turns out, not so much. But it was fun, and I hope you enjoyed yourself.**

**And much like the Doctor and the lovely Martha, I hope you find closure. Although, perhaps they're not as ready to close the book as we thought. ;-)**

* * *

**Summer, 2009 (one year later)**

Dr. Martha Jones sat in her office, dreading beginning the paperwork. It had been three weeks since the horrible five-day debacle in which it looked like ten per cent of the children of Earth might very well be taken, in exchange for an alien race _not_ blowing up the planet. And after twenty-one days, UNIT still knew next to nothing.

The inner reaches of the government had kept the Unified Intelligence Taskforce largely in the dark, and Martha, for her part, had been expressly ordered by her superiors _not_ to contact the Doctor. She wasn't entirely sure why, but she had her theories. She reckoned that someone in government had done something horrible to cause the problem, and was afraid the Doctor would suss it out (which he would) and make them pay for it somehow (which he might). He would also admonish them for the negotiations undoubtedly taking place behind closed doors, and make them all feel like idiots for even entertaining the notion of giving up this planet's greatest resource.

She followed orders reluctantly, and hoped he'd notice that the Earth was crying out for help. But, she had promised herself that if it came down to children actually being removed from the planet, and/or if the threat persisted into a sixth day, she would phone the Doctor, orders be damned. She was a good soldier, but was one of the few living human beings who actually had experience in saving the world, so she did feel she was entitled to make a few calls of her own.

Fortunately, the 456, as they came to be known, had withdrawn late on the fifth day. Something had rebuffed them without letting them take the children, and no-one knew what. But in spite of knowing nothing except roughly who the aliens were and what they wanted, UNIT was still responsible for reporting to the government on the subject. Someone else had to report on alien interaction (all of which took place in total secret) and Martha was in charge of the medical end of things. Trouble was, there had been nothing medically wrong with the kids! As she had learned in her year with UNIT, the less information that actually was available, the more tap-dancing had to be done, which meant more writing and more time.

She sighed heavily and put her fingers to her keyboard.

As if on cue, her phone rang. _Saved by the bell_, she thought gratefully as she dug underneath a stack of files to find the gadget. When she saw who was calling, she smiled.

"Gwen Copper," she said, rather than _hello_. "To what do I owe this honour?"

"Martha, we need your help," her Welsh friend replied with total exhaustion coming through in her voice.

"Why, what's happened?"

"Jack's disappeared."

"Well, you know Jack, Gwen. He's a bit of a…"

"He's been missing for three weeks."

"He was gone for a whole summer once, remember?" Martha reminded her.

"Yeah, this is a bit different," Gwen insisted. She sighed. "He's… despondent. To say the least! He was grieving when he left, and not just grieving… like, if he were a normal man, he'd be suicidal. He was gnashing his teeth, semi-catatonic, like a powder-keg waiting to explode."

"Over what?"

"Did you know that Jack had a grandson?" Gwen asked.

"No!" Martha shot back. "A grandson?"

"Yes, named Stephen. He was killed. Three weeks ago."

"Oh! That's terrible."

"That's not the terrible part."

"What's the terrible part?" Martha asked, afraid to know.

"Well… can you meet up with me and Rhys?"

"When?"

"Now," said Gwen. "Or… in an hour or so? We're staying in London while we try to find Jack. Please, Martha, you're our last hope. See, we have this _tracking_ device. Toshiko developed it, and then put it in a safety deposit box. We went and got it, and it turns out that it follows that thing on Jack's wrist, wherever it goes."

"The Vortex Manipulator?"

"Yeah. Well, she made this thing as an experiment, but she'd got into trouble with the government before, making gadgets and whatnot, so she squirreled it away. Rhys and I got access to it yesterday…"

"What do you mean _got access to it_?"

"Finally got round to reading Toshiko's will. Informal, of course. She left us a box of stuff, all Torchwood-related bric-a-brac she was keeping in her flat. The key was in there."

"Wait, her will? Tosh is dead?"

"Yeah, I'll explain it all later. The point is, Martha… the tracker says that the Vortex Manipulator isn't on the planet anymore. Which means Jack isn't on the planet anymore. And that means there is absolutely no way for me to help him. He shouldn't be alone, not in that state. I was hoping you had some sort of _resource_, you know, at UNIT, or whatever…"

"But you're bloody Torchwood! You've got all the clandestine resources!"

"Torchwood is pretty well non-existent now, Martha."

"It is? How did that happen? Wait, what about Ianto, where is he?"

"Ugh, Martha, I've got a lot to tell you. Can you meet up tonight?"

Martha sighed. She supposed she didn't have a choice.

She also supposed that she didn't have any "resources" at UNIT for retrieving someone who had fled to another planet, and that's not what Gwen was after anyhow.

* * *

In the same little cafeteria where Gwen and Rhys had met up with Lois Abiba, the two of them now sat with Martha Jones. They had ordered tea and some snacks, and were making small-talk.

Finally, Gwen asked, "So… don't you want to know what's up? You had a million questions before. Jack's grandson getting killed. Tosh and Ianto… Torchwood."

"Why don't we just wait," Martha said softly. "I've invited someone to join us."

It wasn't two minutes before she saw the Doctor appear outside the glass. He yanked the door open and strode into the little shop. Martha watched him expressionlessly.

"Hi," he said, sliding into the seat beside her.

"Hello," she said back. "How have you been?"

"Not bad," he answered. He smirked a little. "Got to fly a bus over London not too long ago – that was fun. Met a nice girl – too bad she was a thief."

She smiled at him and chuckled a bit. "Yeah – I heard about that. I was working in Dover at the time, cataloguing what turned out to be totally benign fossils of terrestrial origin. Which means I didn't get to see it. So, who the hell opened a portal in the middle of a city tunnel anyhow?"

"Well, funny story…"

"Sorry, you two," Gwen interrupted. "Can you catch up later?"

* * *

In an hour's time, the chips were eaten, the tea was cold, and Gwen and Rhys were leaving the café. The Doctor moved to a chair across from Martha so that they could talk.

"So… Jack had to _sacrifice_ his grandson?" she whispered. She hadn't wanted to let Gwen know how appalled she was by the news, though she had expressed to her the grief she felt, and understanding of Jack's position.

The Doctor sat with his chin in his palm for a moment, staring at a spot beyond her. "He must have had no other choice. Plus, if he was grieving over Ianto…"

"Oh, I know," Martha moaned. "God, and Ianto was such a good guy. He wasn't the sort who threw himself into the fray, usually. He was mostly just… almost like the office manager. Kept the place running. Kept Jack running."

"He must have had no choice either."

"And the Torchwood hub got blown up…" she mused. "I didn't see that one coming."

"I'm surprised," he commented. "I'd have thought you'd know all about that whole thing by now, Dr. Jones, Chief Medical Officer of the Unified Intelligence Taskforce."

"Well, apparently, information is on a need-to-know basis," she said bitterly. "Bloody UNIT. You'd think that the utter obliteration of the only other known agency that can ally with us against extraterrestrial threats would be something they'd share with the rest of us!"

"There must have been a security breach somewhere."

"So?"

"I'm just sayin'," he said. "I'm not defending them. Notice that I don't work for them anymore. Speaking of which, why didn't you call me? I had to find out about the 456 business through the grapevine, in the Elophannium Galaxy. Not how I want to learn that my friends are in danger."

"I was ordered not to contact you."

"Since when do you follow orders?"

"I followed yours," she pointed out.

"No you didn't! And when you did, it was only when it suited you!"

They both smiled, and then their good humour trailed off as quickly as it had appeared.

"So are you going to be able to find him?" she wanted to know.

"Yeah, I think so. I might know where to look, but if Gwen and Rhys can get me that tracker, it'll make it ten times easier. The hard part will be convincing them to stay the hell out of it," he decided. "Last thing we need is her, hopping about the universe in her condition. I don't know what exposure to the Vortex would do to a human foetus."

"I know!" Martha said, lighting up again. "I can't believe it, just can't picture Gwen as a mum."

"Oh, come on," said the Doctor, dipping his finger in the catsup and licking it off. "I think she'll make a great mum!"

"I suppose, she is a woman who has always risen to the occasion."

"Yeah," he commented, leaning back. "What about you?"

"What _about _me?"

"Any plans to that end?"

"Having a baby?"

"Yeah."

"Er, no…" she replied. "Oh, I'm sorry. You didn't hear."

"Hear what?"

"Tom and I…" she began. Then she stopped and sighed.

"Oh, I'm sorry," he told her. "What happened?"

"Long story. Involves a university posting in Cairo, a truckload of money, and a daft doctor who accepted the job without consulting with his fiancée. It pretty much snowballed from there."

"So is he in Cairo, making a truckload of money now?"

"As far as I know. And I'm here. Working for a government agency that pays almost nothing, and tells us almost nothing. Blimey, I should have just gone with him."

"And done what? Study consipracy theories about aliens and the Pyramids at Giza? Well, I suppose that could have been interesting – they _were_ visited by extraterrestrials more than a few times, you know. Never by me, but I suppose it's never too late to pop in on the ancient Egyptians. Gives me a good idea for the holidays. In any case, Martha, it's not for you. You're not an archaeologist – you don't know how to dig."

His whimsy made her smile. The last time she'd seen him, he was still wound up like a ten-day clock, fighting Daleks, dealing with a myriad of companions, old and new, and all of their issues aboard the TARDIS…

…and with his own daemons. Today, she could tell that at least one of those daemons had been laid to rest.

"What?" he asked, noticing her watching him.

"You seem relaxed, in spite of things."

He knew what she meant. "I am. In spite of things."

She paused, and for a few moments, they just smiled at each other.

"You've had your bout with closure, then," she said, breaking a plesant silence.

"I have," he replied. He couldn't help but blush a little.

"Told you it would happen," she gloated. "And you were all _Martha, what do you know? Don't be so condescending and cryptic, Martha!_"

"Yeah, yeah, I get it, you're very wise," he conceded, half-joking. He added, "I've got to tell you, it was a lot more fun than I thought it would be."

"Pardon me?" she asked, trying not to laugh.

"I thought it would be a bunch of _talking_ and hashing it out, and crying."

"We did some of that," she offered. "Especially the crying. Especially me."

"And crying can be cathartic, yes," he conceded. "But not very enjoyable."

"Well, thank heaven we didn't just stick to the crying."

They smiled at each other for a bit longer, each realising that though their "issues" had been worked out, their angst and desperation had been sorted, there was still a spark.

"Miss Jones, would you care to accompany me to the outer reaches of… wherever the hell Jack ended up?" he asked. "It might help to have both of us there."

"Doctor, I have a life here."

"What, a job you don't even like anymore? Paperwork and secrets?"

She sighed. "Yeah, I guess."

"Well, give it a day or two to think. And when you decide, you can hand in your resignation and…"

"And what?"

"And come help me. For as long as you can, or want."

He stood up and offered her his hand. She smiled and stood, and took it. She set her mouth in a determined position and pulled, leading him straight out of the café.

"What are you doing?" he asked.

"Relenting," she answered. "I'm giving in."

"Well, that didn't take long."

"Nope."

"Where are we going?"

"To my flat."

"Oh. Good. To pack?"

"Yeah, that too."


End file.
